


Revolt

by Safiyabat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, F/M, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, M/M, Past Rape/Non-con, Past Torture, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2015-12-11
Packaged: 2018-05-06 01:22:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 39,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5397602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Safiyabat/pseuds/Safiyabat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fantasy AU.  When a demon and a half-demon are captured after a demonic attack on the human stronghold of Haven is repelled, Castiel is asked by his human friend Dean to be present at the interrogation. He soon finds himself a pawn of forces beyond his control, whether it be his superiors in Heaven (who order him to manipulate the Righteous Man and try to prevent him from reconciling with his brother) or his own attraction to both prisoners. Before long he knows that he must make a choice: between Heaven as he knows it and his Father's commandments, and between his orders and his heart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Can You Hear A Distant Thunder?

**Author's Note:**

> HUGE thanks to my beta, lj user story_monger! Any mistakes are mine, anything good comes from them. 
> 
> Also, my artist, lj user Stormbrite, was fantastic as usual. I literally cannot believe the artwork on this!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Awkward family reunions always go better with chains and shackles.

            Castiel surveyed the battlefield.  From his position, high atop the walls of the city, the stink of the field could almost be forgotten.  Human bards and other evangelists of the glories of war generally glossed over that aspect of conflict, but the angel found that when he was on the scene of a battle he couldn’t escape the stench of death.

            When people bled, that blood left a stink of one type.  When the blood was left to fester in the hot sun for hours on end, drawing flies, it left another.  The foul stench of human viscera, had its own olfactory signature.  When that human died, its bowels released.  Some injuries left humans vomiting onto the field.

            On the whole, Castiel suspected that those writing about the glories of battle had never had to be near one.

            This particular fight had been brutal.   Demons and their allies had besieged Haven for a month.  Castiel and his garrison had been hard pressed to push them back.  They’d only had success with the help of an elite group of human warriors, Hunter Legion.  Angels were not accustomed to needing the assistance of humans, but rather commanding them, and it sat poorly with Castiel’s superiors that they owed so much to these supposedly inferior fighters.

            The battle had been hard fought and only barely won, but barely won still counted as a win.  Haven was secure.  It wasn’t simply the largest city for thousands of miles; it was the largest market.  The economy of the dry, dusty plains would recover from this incursion; however unpleasant this last skirmish might have been, it would never rank as more than a footnote to history.

            A presence lurked behind him.  Castiel recognized that presence.  He would recognize it anywhere.  He turned to face the commander of the Hunter Legion, Dean Winchester.  He’d known Dean for years now, ever since he’d rescued the man from the clutches of a band of demons.  Dean still bore the scars of his imprisonment, and he would for life, but they only made him a better fighter at the end of the day.  This was the extent of Heaven’s concern with the matter.  Castiel might have some private concerns; he might weep for the pain Dean had endured and would always suffer, but no one would benefit from a vocal expression of those sentiments.

            Hard green eyes met Castiel’s as Dean’s generous mouth split into a wide grin.  “We finally kicked their asses, huh, Cas?”

            “We did, Dean.”  He’d never understand why Dean insisted on shortening his name this way, but he’d never managed to cure him of it either.  “You and your men fought well.  The pyres will burn tonight.”

            Dean made a face, and Castiel knew he’d probably erred in mentioning the pyres.  Why should Dean care about pyres?  Haven was not his home.  He’d stayed here for a time as a child, but he had no more connection to those people than Castiel had.  He wanted to save them from the demons, of course, but he knew that not everyone could be saved.  He’d learned that the hard way.

            Footsteps pounded up the stairs leading up to the parapet, and the face of Tracy Bell soon joined them.  “Commander?”

            Dean grinned at her, an expression that came nowhere near his eyes.  “What’s going on, Tracy?”

            “Gordon and Travis were monitoring the field and they were able to take two prisoners, sir,” the girl reported.  She was a pretty young woman, Castiel supposed.  She was competent, which was more of a concern for the garrison commander.

            “Two!”  Even Dean was impressed.  “They demons?  Or are they just humans working for the demons?”

            “One of them is a demon, sir.  She reacted to salt.  The other one seems to be some sort of… half-breed, I suppose, sir.  He doesn’t react to salt or to holy water, but he seems to be attached to the demon.  And he doesn’t seem fully human, either.”

            Castiel sucked in breath.  “An abomination?”  He’d heard of demon-human hybrids.  They were rare.  Few demons were willing to take the risk of creating one, given the power of the creature created.  “Filth!”

            “At the moment, yes,” Tracy admitted.  “Battle isn’t clean, especially when you’re on the losing side.  We’ve got them down in the dungeons; we figured the Commander would want to chat with them.”  She glanced away.

            Few of Dean’s subordinates wanted to be around when Dean “chatted” with a prisoner.  Even if the prisoner was a demon.

            “Good call,” Dean told her.  “You can go ahead and get them cleaned up first, though.  I want to see what I’m working with.”

            Tracy bowed.  “Right away, sir.”  The girl disappeared.

            Castiel turned to his charge.  Or was Dean better described as his friend?  His angelic superiors preferred the former term, and Castiel had certainly been assigned the task of Dean’s rescue.  He’d been ordered to befriend Dean; they hadn’t come together through any kind of compatibility, but Dean tolerated his foibles and showed him some respect at least, so Cas guessed that they were friends.  

“I assume you’ll have the usual questions for them?”

            “What, you mean like, ‘Why did you come and pester Haven?’ and ‘What does your evil overlord have in mind?’  Yeah, stuff like that.”  Dean shrugged.  “Why?”

            “Nothing about Samuel?”

            “It’s Sam,” Dean replied automatically.  “No one has ever called him ‘Samuel.’  That’s not even his name.  And I’ll ask, but we haven’t heard anything about him in three years, and we didn’t hear much then.  I’m not holding out a lot of hope.”

            “Perhaps they never had him,” Castiel offered.  “Perhaps he simply died or ran away.”

            They both knew that wasn’t true, but Dean ran a hand through his hair anyway.  “Yeah, maybe.  He always was a runner.”  He cleared his throat.  “Should we wait long?”

            “No,” Castiel determined after a moment’s thought.  “The half-breed is dangerous, if nothing else.  If he is attached to the demon in some way, it is probably dangerous as well.  It’s best to interrogate them and dispatch them as quickly as possible.”

            “You’re right.”  Dean shrugged and walked toward the stairs, no movement wasted.  “Let’s get my tools and we can get started.”

            Castiel shuddered.  At least it would get him away from the image of the battlefield.  Even marginal improvement was still improvement, although he had to admit that it was merely changing one grim scene for another.

            Dean returned to his tent, stark and white on the dead grass in the center of town.  The tent could have slept ten men easily, with room for their armor besides, but Dean was the commander and needed room for meetings and such.  That gave him an enormous walled tent to himself, complete with furniture.  It was probably as close to a settled home as he’d ever had, at least since his father founded the Hunter Legion, and as far as Castiel was concerned, he’d earned it.  He could have lived without the long, thin box of tools that the human retrieved from under his camp bed, though.

            Once that box had been grabbed, the pair walked back into the town proper and sought out the dungeons.  Castiel had no stomach — angels didn’t need to eat — but if he did, it would have turned at the thought of going down into the bowels of Haven’s repository for the unwanted.  He understood the need to keep certain elements of society away from the rest of it – the criminals, the dangerous.  And he knew that exiling those elements, casting them out beyond the walls, ran a high risk of handing them right over to the wild bands of demons looking to tear civilization down.

            Who was to say, though, that places like this didn’t go just as far toward creating demons as the demons themselves did?  He could feel the pain, the misery and the despair as he descended the spiral staircase into the depths of the “justice center.”  There were men here who had been thrown into a hole and forgotten except for the occasional crust of bread thrown in after them.  There were those who would have prayed for such treatment, if they could remember how to pray.

            The room for the interrogation of demons had been set up at some distance from the other cells, which offered the angel some relief.  The men entered the chamber in silence and took in the spectacle before them.

            The demon was female, or at least in female form, dark of hair and fair of skin.  She’d been stripped down and dressed in a loincloth with some of the grime on her face and limbs washed away before she’d been strapped to a chair in the middle of a devil’s trap.  Her predicament didn’t seem to distress her though.  She watched them come into the room with her head tilted to the side, onyx eyes glittering and mouth fixed into a smirk.  Her skin bore a number of tattoos, some of which were tribal markings and some of which were magical or mystical in purpose.  This was her own body then – a custom-crafted host body, like unto an angel’s vessel, not a possessed human.  This was good – it spared the good guys any pangs of conscience about torturing a possessed host.  “Well well well,” she purred as Dean and Castiel entered.  “A human and an angel.  We should feel honored, Samael.”

            Samael was the name of the half-breed, then.  Castiel recoiled at the use of an angelic name for a half-demon abomination, although he doubted that such a thing would have been given any choice in his own name.   The cambion lacked the easy demeanor of his companion.  Where she was petite, he was a massive mountain of a man.  He’d been chained with his arms suspended over his head in what was supposed to be a position of stress, but his feet rested easily on the floor.  Like his companion, he’d been stripped and re-dressed in a simple loincloth.  Castiel’s breath caught in his throat at the stunning detail of the man’s musculature.  Chestnut hair reached to his shoulders and he looked out at the world through yellow eyes.  Some of his tattoos matched the demon's, some did not.  He didn’t respond to his companion with words, but by turning a snarl of unrestrained hate toward Dean and Castiel.

            A snarl that cut itself short when he saw Dean.  Interesting.

            Dean glanced at the guards, who backed up.  One of them sported an impressive black eye and another seemed to be favoring his right side a little bit.  It couldn’t have been the woman; she wore the demonic cuffs that the angels had provided.  Had the cambion fought back?  “Good to know there’s some fight left in you, Sam-ay-el,” the commander said, setting the box on the table and opening it up.

            The prisoners could both see the contents, easily.  All of the knives, blades, and scalpels were laid out on display for just that purpose.  Dean had explained it once; he’d learned this while held by Lilith and her band.  You let the subject see the instruments and their brains did half the work for you.

            Castiel wondered if it worked that way for demons.

            “Oh, you have no idea how much fight there is in Samael,” the woman told him.  “He was always Daddy’s favorite.”

            “He’s your brother, then?” Castiel prodded.

            She turned those malicious eyes onto him, and he couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable.  Even mostly naked and filthy as she was, she was beautiful.  He could see her twisted, horrifying soul and she was still beautiful.  “Half,” she confessed.  “Same father.  Different mothers.  In case you hadn’t noticed, he’s only half demon.”

            “We’d picked up on that, thanks.  The half doesn’t matter.  He’s got your blood, he’s fighting on your side.”  Dean gave a thin little smile.

            “Like he had a choice,” she pointed out.  “Do you really think that he’d have been welcome here, among humans, if he’d been found out?”

            “He’d have been put down,” Castiel acknowledged.  “With mercy, before he could turn to sin.”

            The cambion didn’t speak.  His lip curled though.  It was hard to tell if he was laughing or sneering.

            Dean pulled a knife out of the case, one with a wavy blade.  It wasn’t the most useful of blades in the heat of battle – too flimsy – but it had plenty of use here.  He grabbed a small clay jug of holy water from underneath the table.  “Here’s how this is going to go,” he said in a conversational tone.  “I’m going to ask questions, you’re going to answer them.  We’re going to have a little fun.”

            “Oh Dean,” the demon said, shaking her head in a gesture that looked like pity.  “I’m sure that you’re very skilled with those little pig-stickers, but you’re forgetting something, aren’t you?”

            Castiel’s Grace went cold.  How had this woman known Dean’s name?  “What’s that?” he asked, trying not to let his fears show in his voice.

            “I’m a demon.”  She leaned forward, a leer on her face.  “There isn’t anything that you can do to me with those that hasn’t already been done, over and over and over again.  I know you studied with Alastair.  So did I, Dean.  So you can go ahead and cut me up, if that’s how you get your rocks off.  But it makes you more like one of us than anything else, which is kind of ironic when you think about it.”

            Dean snarled.  “Maybe I’ll cut into baby brother, then.  See if I can get him to make sweet music.”

            Samael snorted.

            “Take a good hard look, Dean-o,” the woman sneered.  “I know he needs to be dunked into a lake or something, but do you not see the scars?”

            “You going to tell me he studied under Alastair too?”  Dean quirked up one eyebrow.

            “No.  Someone much, much more creative.”  The woman smiled then, all teeth.  “You won’t be a happy man if you cut into him.  But you don’t need to...  I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.  Ask your questions.  I’ll answer them.”

            Castiel looked at the abomination.  Just as the woman had said, his body bore an almost obscene number of scars underneath all of the ink and grime.  Samael caught him looking and curled his lip at him.  The angel looked away.  He shouldn’t be thinking about what the man must have endured to earn a demon’s pity.  He shouldn’t be thinking of the cambion as a man at all.

            “What’s your name?” Dean barked out.

            “You can call me Meg.  I’ve had a lot of names, over the centuries, but Meg is the one I’m best known by.”  Meg relaxed a little better into her bonds.  “And you’re Dean Winchester.”

            The abomination’s response when Dean’s name was mentioned fascinated Castiel.  A look of supreme peace passed over his face, just for a moment.  As an angel, Castiel lacked the emotional capacity to describe it, but his best reference would be the face of someone who had achieved the end of a long quest.  At the same time, his entire body tensed up, as though something about that name in the demon’s mouth caused an instinctive reaction for the youth.

            “Why were you besieging Haven?” Dean asked.

            “Lilith’s people were besieging Haven because you’re sitting right on top of a nexus of trade routes.  They’ve got humans to feed too, you know.  They want to take it over so that they can expand their reach, eventually take over.”

            “And you don’t?”  Castiel stepped forward.

            “No, angel, my tribe is a little more traditional when it comes to human settlements.  We like to tear things down.  Our Master isn’t a big fan of humanity.”  She winked at him as though he was supposed to be in on the joke.

            Castiel didn’t do jokes.  “I assume that you share his distaste,” he commented.

            “Humanity hasn’t done much for me or mine,” she shrugged.  “Baby brother’s soft on them though.”

            Samael rolled his eyes.

            “Aw, ain’t that sweet.  It’s not going to save his sorry ass, but it’s sweet.”  Dean barely spared a glance for the giant in chains.  “You say ‘Lilith’s people.’  So you weren’t part of the group besieging Haven?”

            “Nope.  We tagged along because Samael had someone he wanted to see inside.  Wouldn’t shut up about it for weeks I finally took him out sight-seeing.”  She stretched her neck out.  “I don’t suppose I could bug you for a backrub, there, angel?  This chair is cramping me up something fierce.”

            “Angels don’t give backrubs.”  Castiel wasn’t going to think about putting his hands on her bare skin, and he certainly wasn’t going to think about putting his hands on the abomination’s bare skin either.

            “Pity.  I’ll teach you later.”

            Dean scowled at her, leaning into her space.  “There ain’t going to be a later for you, or your brother.  This is it, lady.  It’s over.  Once we’re done here you’re joining your buddies on the pyre.”

            She laughed.  “First of all, you’re not dumb enough to think Lilith’s tribe would have anything to do with Azazel’s children?”

            Both Dean and Castiel drew back.  “Azazel?” Dean hissed.

            “That explains why the abomination has an angelic name,” Castiel sighed.  “Azazel was once one of the Host himself, but Fell with Lucifer.”

            “What, the eyes didn’t give you a really freaking strong hint?”  Meg shook her head.  “Maybe Lucifer’s right.”

            “Lucifer?”  Dean stepped right up to Meg and pulled her hair back, exposing her throat.  “What do you know about Lucifer?”

            “The Lightbringer is our Master,” she told him, laughing.  “When you killed our father, you delivered us into Lucifer’s hands.  Our tribe merged with his.  The story’s in the tattoos, if you know how to read them.  And Lucifer and Lilith never work together.”

            Castiel nodded.  “It’s true, Dean.”  The words felt like ash in his mouth.  “If they were working for Lucifer, they wouldn’t have been part of Lilith’s attack plan.”

            “Then why were you here?”  Dean sneered.  “Oh, right.  Little Samael had someone he wanted to see.  Tell me who it is.”

            “He’s already seen that person.”  Meg’s face went perfectly serious now.

            “No.  Uh-uh.  Not happening.”  Dean picked up the knife again.  “If he’s got a girl in Haven, if someone’s renting herself out to some demonic half-breed, then we need to know about it.  We need to nip this kind of crap in the bud.”

            “There’s no girl.”  Meg’s eyes narrowed.  “Your brain just went straight to sex, didn’t it?”

            Dean blinked.  “Well yeah – why else would he come into a human city and get the two of you killed?”

            “There are all kinds of ties that bind people together, Dean.  Demons do things for the same reason you do things.  If you found out that your little angel friend was in danger, you’d want to see him to make sure he was okay, right?”

            “Well of course.”  Dean frowned.

            Castiel rolled his eyes.  Dean shouldn’t be engaging in discussion or debate with a demon.  “Your point?”

            “You’re assuming that Samael spent his entire life with us, in the tribe.  That he has no family ties among the settled men.  That’s not true.  He wanted to see his human family one last time and I wanted to indulge him.  So here we are.  He’s done that, so we can leave now.”

            “There is no leaving!” Dean bellowed.  “You’re going to tell me exactly what family he thinks he has!”  He slammed his hand on the table.  “Is it his mother?  Did he come back to see the mother who screwed a demon and gave birth to a monster?  Because we’ll throw her out onto the pyre faster than we’ll put you two out there!”

            Meg laughed out loud.  “No.  Believe it or not – I mean you’d have to ask him, but I think he’d be the first to try to convince her not to make that decision.  His mother made a deal.  Her husband had died.  She made a deal with our father to restore her husband to life.  Samael was the result – and what Azazel really wanted, after all.”

            “So who the hell could he want to visit?  Who could love such a thing or want to see it?”

            “A brother,” Meg told him simply.

            Castiel froze.

            “His brother was taken by demons, maybe six years ago?  Lilith’s band.  He was rescued by angels, but Samael here, he’s got less than no use for angels.  He’s been obsessed with seeing with his own eyes that his brother’s alive and in one piece.  He’s done that.  We can go now.”  She shifted her eyes to her brother.  “So can we get a move on already, Samael?”

            A crack opened up down the center of the devil’s trap, and the demonic cuffs opened up.  The woman stood up, rubbing her wrists.  “I made a promise to my little brother,” she explained, walking right up to a stunned Dean Winchester, “that I wouldn’t hurt you.  So I’m fulfilling my promise.”  She walked over to Samael.  “Come on.  Get down from there already before I think you look like too much fun.”

            “I’m staying, Meg.”

            The abomination hadn’t made a sound yet, and his voice sounded hoarse and scratchy.  That didn’t seem to surprise Meg, who scowled at him.  “Excuse me – the hell you are.”  She held up a hand and all of the humans, who had been darting toward her, froze in place.  “They are going to _kill you_ , Samael.  Painfully.  They’re not going to care that you’ve never tortured a human or that you’ve never hurt someone who didn’t deserve it, they don’t care.  You’re just filth to them, no different from me, and they’re not going to care that you’re half-human.  They’re just going to kill you.”

            The creature’s response came with a little smile that was both sad and loving.  “I know.  Thank you for everything, Meg.”

            Her face twisted.  “No.  No no no.  I didn’t come all this way so you could throw away all that potential, all that brilliance, because of prejudice and idiocy.  And where do you think I’m going to go once Lucifer finds out I let humans and an angel murder his favorite plaything?  No way.  This is not happening.  Get yourself down, we’re leaving.  Right now.  You saw what you came to see.”

            “Meg,” the man sighed, and for a moment he looked young.  Impossibly young, younger even than Dean.  For all of the hard lines of his body, and all of the alien stirrings that his body caused in Castiel, what the angel wanted to do most was to wrap this monster up in his wings and take him someplace safe.  “It’s okay.  You’ll find a welcome home with Abaddon; you know this.  She’ll shelter you.”   He blinked and the iron shackles fell away from his wrists.

            “That’s not the point,” Meg snapped.  “You dying here like some kind of … of sacrificial lamb would be the biggest waste of everything since I don’t even know what.  We can both go to Abaddon.  Come on.”

            “She’s not going to be keen to take on Lucifer’s sloppy seconds,” Samael pointed out.  “And if she is, then I’m pretty sure that’s not a party I want in on, you know?  Just… go.  Save yourself.”

            Dean, trapped as he was, gave a bitter laugh.  “You expect me to believe that you’re just going to give up without a fight now that you’ve seen whoever it is that you came here to see?”

            Castiel sighed.  “Do you remember your birth family, Samael?”

            The abomination glared.  “Do you remember yours?”

            “Hey!” Dean shouted.  “That’s an angel of the Lord!  You’d better show him some respect, or he’ll burn you alive from the inside out!”

            Meg gestured, and Dean shouted in pain.  “Did you forget that he just said he was going to surrender himself for execution, dumbass?”

            “Meg!” Sam cried out, and Dean’s face untwisted itself.  “You promised you wouldn’t hurt him!”

            It was all of the confirmation that Castiel needed.  “You were Sam Winchester,” he marveled.  He reached out with his Grace to hold the demon Meg in place and prevent her from leaving, even as he turned to stare at the abomination before him.  “You were Dean’s brother.”

            “No.”  Dean swallowed.  “Impossible.  My brother was human.  He was human!”

            Samael – Sam – gave a little huff of laughter.  “Not so much.”

            “You came all this way to see him again,” Meg sneered, “and he won’t even believe you’re you.”

            “Well I wasn’t exactly planning to do a big reveal.”  Sam gestured and Castiel’s hold on Meg was severed.  “Go, Meg.  Save yourself.”

            “I’m not leaving you alone with these bastards,” the demon insisted.  “Not in your current mental state; you’re clearly not in your right mind if you think just baring your throat to these zealots is a great plan.”  She stepped forward and put one hand on her brother’s arm.  “Look at these people.  That brother you were so desperate to see ‘one last time’ doesn’t give a crap about you, Samael.  That angel?  He wants to smite us both.  And these guards?  Yeah, they want to put you ‘in your place’ before they kill you.  None of them cares what happened to you out there.”

            “I know.”  Samael put a hand – a huge hand, proportional to his body, and when did Castiel start thinking about hands or what they might feel like? – onto her tiny shoulder.  “I need to do this, Meg.  There’s no place for me anymore, and I want… I want it to be Dean.”

            The demon looked stricken.  Castiel hadn’t known that demons could feel, not like this.  “This is stupid, Samael,” she insisted.  “Come with me.  I’ll keep you safe in Abaddon’s tribe.”

            “This is what I want, Meg.”  He kissed the top of her head.

            Dean found himself released from his invisible bindings.  “Lot of help you are,” he muttered, glaring at Castiel.

            “Demons with bonds of affection,” the angel defended.  “It’s new to me.” He reached out and grabbed Meg again, this time physically.  “I’m afraid that she’s not going anywhere,” he informed the abomination.  “We can’t let so valuable a target as Azazel’s daughter out into the world.”

            Sam frowned at him.  “Look.  I’m giving you what you want.  Azazel’s son, not even fighting.  A powerful half-demon that you can wipe from the face of existence with a thought in exchange for letting my sister go.”

            “Oh, she’s your sister now?” Dean spat, drawing closer to Sam.  “I thought I was supposed to be your brother.”

            Sam looked down to meet his eyes.  “You are.”

            “Then how can she be your sister?”

            “Different sides.  Look, it doesn’t matter.  You’re going to kill me, that’s why you’re here.”  Sam’s breathing sped up and his hands clenched loosely at his sides; he was starting to panic.  That wouldn’t be good.

            Dean’s eyes narrowed.  “My brother didn’t have any other siblings.”

            “Not true.  I had a different father.  Your father, by contrast, had another, secret wife by whom he had another son.”  His jaw clenched.  “Look.  I don’t care what you do to me, just let Meg go.”

            “Anyone pretending to be Sam Winchester wouldn’t go asking me to let a demon live.”  Dean raised his knife.

            Castiel sighed and touched two fingers to the monster’s brow.  The demonic stain was there, certainly, but he could feel the memories there as well.  “This is your brother, Dean,” he said.  “He is telling the truth.”

            Sam blinked, and gold eyes were replaced by hazel.  “Now will you please let Meg go?”

            Dean and Castiel exchanged looks.  “I’m inclined to let her live, Dean,” Castiel told his comrade.

            “Is that because she’s got a nice rack?” the human shot back.  “Because I can give you an hour with her before we gank her.”

            In spite of himself, the angel blushed.  “No, Dean.  This…. This abomination is your brother.  He is very attached to this demon, who is his half-sister.  We can use her as a hostage for his good behavior.”  He saw the doubt in Dean’s eyes and pressed on.  “If we kill her, he’ll not only dig in his heels, he’ll be enraged.  Do you really think he’ll leave anything standing in his path toward revenge?”  He swallowed.  “It’s only until we decide his final fate, Dean.”

            Dean moistened his lips.  “You say he really is my brother.”

            “He is, Dean.”

            Only now did Dean turn around and really look at the abomination.  Sam stood still and let it happen.  “Get him cleaned up,” he ordered finally.  “Get him set up with a tent and a bed and everything.  The girl – she’ll get a cell she can move around in, but she stays on lockdown.  I want a guard on him at all times, until I come for him.”

            Dean walked out of the room as fast as he could without it being classed as a run.  Castiel took another look at Sam, fixing him in his mind before chasing after his charge.


	2. Truth Is Suppressed To Mumbles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Castiel meets the Abomination. It goes abominably.

Castiel intended to avoid both prisoners.  They both attracted him more than he liked, and he knew that attraction was one of the pathways to doubt and to Falling.  He should simply stay away from them and let them be.  Dean, of course, wouldn’t let that happen.  “I need you to talk to them for me, Cas,” he admitted with a huge sigh.  “I can’t do it.”

            Castiel squinted at his friend.  “The mighty Dean Winchester cannot speak to a demon?”

            “She insists she’s Sammy’s sister!”  Dean paced in front of his camp bed.  “I keep wanting to punch her in her stupid face.”

            “That wouldn’t be conducive to gaining information.”  The angel grimaced.  “But I thought you would want to talk to Samuel – Sam – yourself.  You’ve searched for him for years.”

            “I have, but it’s – I mean, you heard the things he was saying.  And he’s not – he’s not human, Cas.  I don’t know if I can face him.  But I need to know what happened.”  He sighed.  “Can you just… I don’t know, prime the pump for me?”

            And so Castiel found himself approaching the demon, Meg, first.  Someone had painted the entire floor and ceiling of a generously sized cell with devil’s traps; it probably would have been a cell reserved for someone of noble blood.  On one level, Castiel supposed that Meg qualified; she had been the daughter of a powerful demon chief, after all.  If demons had a noble equivalent, the family of Azazel would be it.  More seemly clothing had also been found for her: a simple white sleeveless tunic.  “Well well,” she smirked when Castiel arrived to visit her.  “I wondered when I would get some company.  Grab a chair.”

            “You are not my hostess,” he informed her, as she seated herself in one of the chairs and leaned back.  “You are a prisoner living on borrowed time.  You had to know that your plan wouldn’t work.”

            She snorted.  “Well I wasn’t expecting my little brother to decide to commit suicide by hunter, that’s for sure.”  She tossed her hair behind her shoulders and stuck her chin out.  It drew attention to her lips.  “It doesn’t matter.  He’ll still get me out before he lets Captain Charming there kill him.”

            “You seem very certain.  You’re a demon,” he said, uncertain as to whether he was reminding her or himself.  “The Winchesters were raised to hate nothing more than they hate demons, and the line of Azazel more than any other demon.  You really think that Sam will break with his brother to rescue Azazel’s unholy spawn?”

            She gave him a lazy, feline smile.  “Uh, Feathers?  Did you miss the part where Samael _is_ Azazel’s unholy spawn?  Because it’s the truth.  He owes me, and he knows it.  He’ll get me out before he goes.”  She shifted, displaying the swell of her breasts.  “I know you didn’t come all this way to talk about little Samael’s family tree.  Why did you come down here just to look at li’l old me?”

            Castiel shifted.  “You are correct.  I’m not here just to look at you.”  He pressed his lips together; that had come out wrong.  “I had hoped to gain some knowledge about what transpired with Samuel between when he left his brother’s side and now.”

            The question changed Meg’s body language, at least.  She sat up, face a sneer of contempt, and drew her limbs into herself.  “’Left his brother’s side?’  You make it sound like he wanted to leave.  Like he betrayed his family somehow.”

            “He did.  He abandoned his family with no warning and no message, not even a note.  His brother was completely devoted to him and Samuel left without so much as a farewell.”  Yes, Castiel would do well to remember that in the future.  It would be better than letting the boy’s good looks and sad demeanor get the best of him.

            “Uh-uh.  Wrong.”  She sniffed.  “He was sold by John Winchester when John realized that he’d been possessed at the time of Samael’s conception.”  She rolled her shoulders.  “I might have had something to do with that realization.  I might or might not have been involved with the purchase, too.”  She snickered.  “Daddy was pretty eager to get his hands on Samael.”

            Castiel hesitated.  “Demons lie.”

            She rolled her eyes.  “What part, exactly, do you think that I’m lying about?  And what incentive do you think that I have?  We wanted him.  You had him.  It was easy.  John was disgusted – absolutely disgusted – when he found out that he’d been raising a ‘monster.’  He’d never been the president of little Sammy’s fan club, am I right?”

            Castiel squinted at her.  “You’re awfully irreverent for someone facing a death sentence.”

            “You act like I’ve got something to gain by kissing ass, Feathers.”  She smirked.  “Anyway.  All I had to do was go up to Winchester, show him what happened, pay him for little Samael and possess the boy.  John Boy got to feel like a hero, pretending like he saved the girl I rode in on, and Sammy never even knew what hit him until I was in him.”  She licked her lips, but wouldn’t meet his eyes.

            “You possessed your own brother?”  The angel recoiled.

            “Demon,” she pointed out.  “I don’t mind admitting that I had a little fun with him before I brought him home.  He wasn’t thrilled with that.”  She hung her head, just for a second.  “But we’ve squared that stuff away.  We’re very close now.”

            _Close._  The thought made Castiel’s skin crawl.  He’d heard some kidnap victims became close with their captors.  Of course, Sam was no innocent victim.  His very blood made him incapable of innocence.  “What are his abilities?”

            She shrugged.  “He’s telekinetic.  He’s precognitive.  He’s sensitive – he can sense different entities, like ghosts and the like, even when they’re invisible.”  She smirked.  “He can exorcise demons, he can kill demons, he can put the hurt on a demon worse than any torture Alastair ever devised.  That’s just what I’ve seen him do.  I saw him resist you yesterday, so it seems like there are things he can do to angels too but don’t ask me for a list.”

            Castiel couldn’t repress a shudder.  “Why not?”

            “Because his experience with angels is limited and wasn’t exactly free”  She hesitated, seeming to weigh something, and then pressed on.  “You guys don’t like the front lines much.”  She sniffed in contempt.  “Know what else my little brother can do?  He can fight.”  She smiled, the nasty kind of smile that a demon got when they were letting their grim side out.  “Oh, he can fight, Feathers.  I’ve seen him take down demons with nothing more than a little knife and a bad attitude.  I’ve seen him take down angels.”

            That frightened him.  “That shouldn’t be possible.”

            She shrugged.  “He’s the only human worth getting excited about.  So much potential, so much talent, and you people are going to cut his throat and watch him bleed out for your own entertainment.”

            “He isn’t human, Meg.  He’s a danger to the rest of the world.  Although his ultimate fate rests in others’ hands.”  Castiel backed toward the door.  “Is there anything that I can get for you?”

            “A scraper so I can get out of this trap, grab my brother and head for Abaddon’s tribe?”

            He shook his head.  “Why Abaddon’s tribe?  Why not return to Lucifer?”

            “You’re joking, right?”  She stood up.  “I didn’t just let his favorite plaything escape, I brought him here.  Knowing what would happen to him.  Lucifer trusted me above everyone else, and this is what I did.  Abaddon is the only one who can keep me safe from Him.  If Samael won’t return to Lucifer of his own accord — and let’s face it; he won’t — then we need to make other arrangements.”

            Castiel swallowed.  “Plaything?  I thought Sam was a trusted warrior.”

            She walked toward the window.  She couldn’t make it all the way to the aperture, of course, but she could make it close enough to see outside.  “Warrior, yes.  Anyone will fight when they have to.  Trusted?  Not so much.  Lucifer and my father were close.  Lucifer took quite the shine to Samael.   He sees Samael as a toy.”

            “And you allow this?”

            “I brought him here, didn’t I?  I helped him to escape.  I love Lucifer.  He is my Master.  But I can understand why Samael doesn’t have the same devotion.”  She sighed, shoulders hunching for a moment.  “It was different with our father – with Azazel.  Samael hated him, but I think Dad liked that.  He still taught Sam, trained him, and didn’t hurt him in the same way.”  She shrugged.  “I mean, the kid’s willing to let the family that sold him to demons cut his throat.  You didn’t think it was all roses and pomegranate ices, did you?”

            Castiel asked a few more questions, mostly about the power structure in Lucifer’s tribe, before he left her and retreated to his quarters, composing his mind to seek revelation from his superiors.  Zachariah came to him immediately.  

“Castiel, you seem troubled,” the senior angel said.  His armor, unlike Castiel’s, was burnished and bright, untouched by combat.

            The warrior nodded.  “Dean Winchester’s brother – half-brother – has been found,” he explained, “and he is not human.”

            Zachariah froze for a moment, but he recovered his aplomb quickly.  “Indeed.  I had not expected that the abomination would be found alive at all.”

            Castiel explained the circumstances under which Sam was now in custody, and Zachariah tilted his head to the side.  “So where is the problem, Castiel?  Smite him.  Smite him and the demon whore both.  There will be no complications.”

            Castiel wanted to wince at both the thought of harming Meg without cause and at the idea of simply smiting Sam.  He held back his reaction; it was bad enough that he was having these feelings, he didn’t need to let Zachariah see them and face punishment if he didn’t let them affect his judgment.  “On the contrary, sir.  There would be complications.”

            Zachariah’s eyebrows drew together and he shook his head.  “How so?  The mud monkeys aren’t really given to questioning our decisions, Castiel.”

            “That isn’t the case with the Righteous Man, sir.  Dean Winchester is conflicted over his brother’s return.  We require his support and cooperation, and a summary execution of his brother would likely cause him to resist us.”

            Zachariah scoffed and waved a hand.  Castiel sometimes wondered how the senior angel managed to utilize such human mannerisms when he loathed the younger beings so thoroughly.  “He’ll get over it.  The boy is an abomination, half-demon and of the line of Azazel.  Dean Winchester abhors demons and Azazel.  It isn’t as though he’s going to cuddle up to the kid.”

            “No.  But he needs to come to that conclusion himself, or else he will resist.  Dean is a strong-willed individual.”  Castiel swallowed.  “We mustn’t underestimate his ability to cause trouble for our kind.  His knowledge, skill and resourcefulness make him formidable.”

            Zachariah made a dissatisfied grunt and waved a hand.  “Alright, fine.  Whatever.  You’ve been a skilled tactician for a number of years.  I’m sure you know what you’re talking about.  Don’t let his sentimentality for the boy overwhelm him, though.  The boy is a danger.  If he needs to be encouraged to remember the boy’s origins, do so.”

            Castiel saluted and continued on to Sam’s tent.

            Dean had ordered that Sam be given a tent that resembled Dean’s in size.  That was probably intended to be an honor, and there were plenty of people who would see it as such.  The eight guards – two per side – around the tent, however, couldn’t leave even a child ignorant of the inhabitant’s status.  Neither could the fact that Castiel was allowed to walk right in, without announcing himself or asking permission.

            Not that Sam objected.  He sat on the camp bed, huge hands with long fingers folded in his lap.  He’d been given a chance to wash up, like Meg, and like Meg he’d been provided with more substantial clothing.  In this case, “more substantial” consisted of a kind of black leather kilt and sleeveless tunic.  Castiel lifted an eyebrow.  “A kilt?”

            The young man shrugged.  “They didn’t have any pants that fit.”

            One of the guards in the room, a hunter that Castiel recognized as Walt, startled.  “It can speak?”

            Sam glared at him, but didn’t respond.

            Castiel waved a hand at the two guards.  “I will take over from here.  You may send Bobby Singer.  He can take over the observation when I’ve finished.”

            The humans exchanged glances.   “Dean said he was to be watched by two soldiers at all times,” said the other one, the one who wasn’t Walt.  Castiel thought his name must be Roy, but didn’t care enough to read his mind.

            “Singer is worth ten men such as yourself.  Go.”  He banished them to the walls with a thought, deciding after a moment to keep them within the city walls.  “Are you well, Sam?”

            The abomination glanced at him with indifference.  “The tent is large.”

            Castiel glanced around.  The tent was, indeed, large.  It contained a bed and a chamber pot.  Neither looked like they’d seen much use.  “Have you been given food or drink?”  The prisoner didn’t respond.  Castiel sighed.  “Is denial of sustenance a choice on your part, Sam?  Or on your brother’s?”

            Sam still didn’t speak, and Castiel stuck his head out to speak to the person in front of the door flap.  “I will require water for the prisoner, and a bowl of broth,” he informed the guards stationed there.

            “The commander didn’t leave any such instructions.”  The guard licked his lips.

            “Perhaps he didn’t think it necessary,” Castiel snapped, squinting.  “If he’d wanted to mistreat the man, he’d have left him in the ‘justice center.’  Water and broth.  Perhaps some bread.  Now.”  He added just enough Grace behind the word to let the guard know that he wasn’t joking and turned back to the young man, who continued to watch with a blank expression.  “I apologize, Samuel.  I didn’t know that you would be treated this way.  One of us would have seen to it before now.”

            Sam huffed quietly, but changed the subject.  “Is Meg alright?”

            “Her cell is comfortable.  She’s been given more suitable clothing.  She would prefer not to be confined, but she is not being actively harmed and she won’t be harmed so long as you are cooperative.”  Castiel hesitated.  “She is worried for you.”

            Sam smirked.  “She shouldn’t be here.  You should let her go.”

            “It is not in my nature to simply let a demon go, Samuel.”

            Sam glared at the use of the full name.  “She’s not here to hurt anyone.  She’s more than redeemed herself.”

            “She possessed you!”  Castiel stepped forward.  “She convinced your father to sell you to Azazel, and then she possessed you to bring you back to him!”

            The taller man chuckled softly.  “She did.  Who cares?”

            The angel’s jaw dropped.  “Excuse me?”

            “I’m only being held until Dean remembers what he’s supposed to do with things like me.  Why does anyone care what Meg did with me after John threw me away?”  He blinked.  “And Meg didn’t have to argue very hard to convince John to sell me.  He was already looking for buyers.  Azazel just didn’t realize that.”  He shook his head slightly.  “Anyway.  Isn’t your church always preaching about repentance and redemption?  She’s repented for what she did to me.  She’s seeking redemption, in her way.  Why not just let her go – out to Abaddon’s tribe, who aren’t anywhere near Haven or any other human settlement?”  He spread his hands wide.

            Castiel swallowed.  “She is a demon.  Humans can repent.  There is no redemption for demons.”  He moved closer.

            “Or their children.”  Sam smirked and returned his hands to his lap.  “How is Dean?”

            “He’s well.  Busy.  You know how it is.  He commands Hunter Legion now.”

            “I can see that.”  He glanced at the walls of the tent.  “Canvas walls don’t hide much.”  He swallowed.  “But he’s doing okay?  Any lasting effects from Alastair?”

            Castiel looked up sharply.  “He was caught because he was looking for you.”

            Sam sighed.  “I’m aware.”  He schooled his expression into one of perfect blandness, almost angelic.  “He could have asked his father.”

            “You expect me to believe that John Winchester knowingly handed you over to the demon he hated most?”  Castiel drew back.

            Sam glowered.  “Believe it, don’t believe it.  It’s the truth.”

            “And from there?”  It seemed too much to be believed, but Castiel had to keep pressing on.  He needed the rest of the story.

            “I was trained.  If you can call it that.  I learned to use abilities gleaned from the other side of my heritage – Azazel’s side.  Of course, I was always going to be psychic.  That part comes from Mary.”

            “You don’t call her Mother or Mom?”  The fact startled Castiel.  Dean, after all, always referred to Mary Winchester with reverence, and so had John Winchester.

            Sam shrugged.  “I never knew her, remember?  All that I know about her is that she died, and that she made a deal with Azazel that resulted in my existence.  I’m sure she was a wonderful person; she loved John very much.”

            “How many humans have you killed?”

            “Humans?  That probably depends on your definition.  Probably none.”  He met Castiel’s eyes squarely.  “Most of the time, you know, we don’t fight humans.  We fight other demons.”

            Castiel could have gotten lost in those eyes.  “Indeed?  Then why was Lilith attacking Haven?”

            “I said most of the time.  Control of Haven and its trade routes would be a huge advantage, although demons aren’t prone to staying in one place.  She’d have put in a puppet government.”

            “Cambions like you?” Castiel suggested.

            Sam leaned back a little, bracing himself on his arms.  “I’m not entirely sure how Lilith’s tribe is run.  Azazel probably would have put cambions in.  We’re more comfortable in long-term settlements and, depending on who we are and how we were raised, we’re more likely to be loyal to the chief of the tribe.”  He snorted.  “That was his way of thinking, anyway.”

            “You were not loyal to Azazel, then?”  The angel moved forward.

            “I had nowhere else to go.”  He shrugged.  “But I can’t say I was loyal, no.”

            Castiel scanned Sam and found no hint of deception.  At the same time, Sam wasn’t human.  He could have some way of concealing his thoughts or emotions from angelic scrutiny.  He ought not to trust Sam, to give in to the earnestness of his voice, no matter how tempting it might be.  After all, demons specialized in temptation.  “Tell me about Lucifer.”

            All of the color drained from the young man’s face.  “What’s there to tell?” he asked in a strained voice.  “I’m sure you know the basics.  Archangel.  Rebel.  Created demons.”

            “Meg says he became fond of you.”  Castiel squinted at Sam.  “What does he like?”

            Sam went still.  “Pain,” he said finally.  “He likes pain.  Every kind of pain.”  His eyes went blank.  “I’d been through some stuff before, but there isn’t anything to compare to Him.”

            The angel paused.  He wanted to reach out and offer some kind of comfort, but there wasn’t any comfort to be offered.  He oughtn’t to be thinking of comfort for something like Sam either.  Sam was damned, no matter what.  “What was it about you that drew him to you?”

            Sam swallowed.  “He said I was made for him.”  He licked his lips.  “That he’d ordered Azazel to make me.  For – for Him.”  Sam grimaced and then visibly got his emotions under control.  “I wasn’t his confidant, if that’s what you’re looking for.  I can’t tell you what he was planning.”

            “You’d hardly have been able to comprehend it, even if he’d shared it with you,” Castiel told him, mind racing.  “Did he say why you were created for him?”

            Sam shook his head.  “No.”  He took a deep breath.  “I think he was planning to assign what was left of Azazel’s tribe to me.  If I broke.  But I didn’t.  He didn’t seem to be in a hurry for that either.”  Sam blinked, and his eyes flashed yellow for a moment.  “Sorry.  I don’t have a lot of information for you.  I wish I had more.”

            Castiel sighed.  It was a human expression, one he’d picked up from his time among the creatures, and one that he knew his superiors did not look upon with approval.  “I would not have expected much from you, Samuel.”  He didn’t miss the way the young man’s lips folded together or the slight glare, but they were unimportant.  “What are your plans now?”

            Sam huffed a little.  “You’re joking, right?”

            “I’ve been reliably informed that I lack a sense of humor.”

            Those hazel eyes rolled for a moment.  “I have no plans.  I’ve already lived longer than I expected to.”  He made a face that Castiel couldn’t quite identify, somewhere between bitterness and contempt and a kind of dark humor.  “He’s not even going to do the job himself, is he?”

            “Do you mean Dean?”  The angel raised his eyebrows in surprise.  “You expect Dean to execute his only brother?”

            “I figure he’d be eager.  I’ll do the job myself if he’s so squeamish.”  Sam looked away for a moment.  “How is he?”

            “Tall.  Not as tall as you.  Freckled.”  Castiel shuddered at Sam’s casual offer of self-destruction.

            Sam let out a little growl of frustration.  “Is he well?  Is he happy?  Any little Winchesters running around?  Does he have friends?  Hobbies?  What does he like to do?”

            Castiel narrowed his eyes at the young man.  “And if I tell you these things, you will try to use them against him in some way.  Carry the information back to your Master.”

            Sam punched the mattress, making even Castiel jump.  “I’m going to die, Castiel.  I’m going to die; I came here to die, all I want is to know that my brother is okay before I go.  That’s not too much to ask.  I’m not even asking that he come to tell me himself because if he wanted that, he’d be here and not you.  I just want to know that Dean is happy.  That’s all.”

            Castiel backed toward the entrance, eyes on the abomination.  His mouth felt dry and his limbs heavy; he couldn’t think what might be causing such a reaction.  Angels couldn’t get sick, after all.  “I will carry this message to – to someone – I must leave.”  He left and tied the door flaps shut.  “Don’t let him leave,” he ordered the guard.

            “Can I give him the food I brought?” asked the one who had brought that food.

            Cas hesitated.  “I suppose.  Be careful, and don’t speak to him.  Get in, and get out.  He’s very skilled at gaining one’s sympathy.”

            The hunter ducked into the tent left his burden and returned in seconds.  “Didn’t even look at it,” he reported.  “Some gratitude.”

            “He’s being held captive and starved, and will be executed.  Gratitude is perhaps not to be expected.”  Castiel returned to the citadel.

            This time he got to meet not only with Dean, but with members of the Haven Council.  He recognized them, of course.  Robert Singer was there at the head of the table.  The bearded old warrior greeted the angel with a smile and a nod.  He’d been a friend of John’s once, although he’d also been responsible for his expulsion from Haven.  Jim Murphy, the priest, sat at his left hand.  Dean sat at Singer’s right.  Missouri Mosley, the mystic, sat beside Jim Murphy and Pamela Barnes sat beside Dean.  “Evenin’, Feathers,” Singer greeted.  “I guess you’ve had an enlightening day.”

            Castiel nodded.  “I’ve spoken with both the demoness and the half-breed.  They were not part of the tribe that attacked us most recently.  According to the demoness, there is little love lost between either the tribe of Azazel or Lucifer’s tribe and Lilith’s tribe.”

            Dean snorted.  “So?  They’re still demons.”

            Missouri scowled at him.  “Boy, I will whack you with a spoon.  Only one of them is an actual demon and you know it.”

            Pamela sneered.  “He’s got demonic origins, Missouri.  It doesn’t matter if he’s only got a little bit of demon blood in his veins – he’d still be tainted.  He’s evil.  Everything inside him is evil.  He needs to be put down.”

            Jim winced.  “There wasn’t an evil bone in the boy I remember.  Most of what I remember is a gentle-souled boy who mostly wanted to study.”

            “I remember that he couldn’t ever bring himself to follow orders,” Dean said with a frown.  “He and our father didn’t stop fighting from the time Sam was what – eight?”

            “That would be about when John figured out that he’d been possessed when Sam was conceived,” Singer confirmed with a grim setting of his lips.  “He definitely started treating the boy differently then.”

            Dean rolled his eyes.  “Oh come on, Bobby.  I mean he was hard on us, but he had to be.  Cuddles and cupcakes weren’t going to keep us safe or teach us to fight what was out there.”

            Jim Murphy cleared his throat.  “The standards, however, were very different for each of you.  For you, it was enough to learn to fight.  For Sam, he had to learn to fight, and he had to be as good as you with four years less training and half your size, and show more enthusiasm than you with absolutely none of the encouragement he showed you –“

            “It’s not like a demon was going to go easy on the kid because he was small,” Pamela pointed out.  “John Winchester was a good man, and a good father.”

            “I’ll give you one of the two,” Bobby rumbled.  “He was a good man who had more on him than he ever should have had to deal with.  I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a good father, though.  If he was guilty of selling his son –“

            “Not his son,” Castiel interjected.  “Azazel’s son, a cuckoo in the nest.”  He saw Dean’s expression harden and regretted his words immediately.  He shouldn’t have – the words coincided with his orders, after all – but the regret welled up inside of him nevertheless.

            “Whether or not he was possessed at the time of conception, Sam is still the product of John Winchester’s body.  If he rejected the boy, he should have found another home for him.  Hell, I’d have taken him in a heartbeat,” Jim Murphy said with a vicious glare.

            “A possessed person’s blood changes, their body temperature changes, their entire biology changes.”  Singer shifted.  “It was only sort of Johnny’s body.”

            “It’s still enough.”  Missouri sat with her back as straight as any angel.  “And he still raised that child through eight years before he decided to just shuck him off like bad skin.  That ain’t right.”

            Dean glared right back at her.  “Dad did what he had to, all right?  Sammy wasn’t the little cherub you remember.  Dad needed sons he could trust, sons who would follow orders.  He didn’t feel that he could trust Sammy.”  He massaged his temples.  “And anyway, whose word are we going on for that whole ‘trying to sell him into slavery’ story, anyway?  Sammy, who wouldn’t know the truth if it bit him on the ass, and Meg, who is a demon.  Demons lie.  Come on.”

            “He did wind up with Azazel, with no explanation or farewell.”  Jim crossed his arms across his chest.

            “Yeah, and every other time he tried to run off?”  Dean snorted.  “So what’s he want?”

            “Want?”  Castiel blinked, not quite understanding the question.

            “Yes, what does Sam want?  He’s got to have some kind of an angle, right?  I mean he didn’t come here just looking to catch up.”  Dean’s mouth twisted into a bitter smirk.

            Castiel pulled at the collar of his tunic, suddenly too tight underneath his breastplate.  Why it should be too tight the angel had no idea; he was an angel, their clothes always fit.  “Actually he did.”

            Five pairs of eyes turned to him.  “Excuse me?” Pamela asked him, raising an eyebrow.

            “Samuel expects to die,” Castiel explained.  “His life with Azazel, and then with Lucifer, has been a misery.  He returned to Haven and to Dean expecting execution.  His wish was to verify, with his own eyes, that his brother had survived his ordeal at Alastair’s hands relatively intact.  He has no expectations of a reunion and is confused by the tent and the clothes.  He is not resisting.  He would prefer that the demon Meg be released and that Dean be his executioner, but he’s willing to do the job himself.”

            Absolute silence met his words as all five humans gazed at him in horror.  For once, Castiel couldn’t wonder at their reaction.  He shared it.  “Maybe that would be kindest.”  Pamela spoke first, face pale.  “At least that way Dean would be spared.”

            Dean turned to face her.  “Excuse me?  That’s my brother!  Are you seriously trying to tell me that you want him to kill himself?”

            “Are you seriously trying to tell me that you could just execute your brother?” Her eyes blazed.  “Tell me the truth, Dean.  Can you do it?”

            “Who says he has to be killed?” Jim Murphy added.  “He’s a sad, traumatized, suicidal man who was once a part of this community.  Who we all – excepting Pamela and the angel – once loved and cared for.  Are we seriously willing to just write him off because of something he had no control over?”

            “None of them has any control over what they are,” Singer pointed out.  “We still kill them, because they come for us.  It’s not a choice.”  He sighed.  “At the same time, he is half human.  And he is, at the end of the day, your brother, Dean.”

            Dean sighed.  “He is.  I guess I need to face the music and go talk to him.”

            Castiel stood up.  This was an opportunity to play the role Zachariah had ordered for him, but he found no enthusiasm in himself for it.  “I will go with you, Dean.  You don’t need to face this task alone.”


	3. Taste Earth's Blood And Hunger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The brothers try the reunion thing again. Castiel gets a new job.

Dean got up from his chair and left the chamber.  Castiel followed him, but he didn’t make the mistake of thinking that they would go immediately to Sam’s tent, and he wasn’t disappointed.  Dean led Castiel to the Haven Rose Garden, a maze of thorny bushes with fragrant blooms that offered more privacy than anyplace else in the city.  Dean often retreated there when he required discretion with one of his temporary partners, and it naturally followed that he would seek such a refuge now that he needed privacy of a different sort.

            Once they’d found a little dead end in which to seclude themselves, and Castiel ascertained that no one could hear them, the commander turned to the angel.  “What do you think, Cas?  You think he’s full of crap?”

            “I think your brother has gone for several days without food or water.  His intestines are likely empty.”  He frowned at himself.  He shouldn’t have referred to the youth as Dean’s brother, but in a less humanizing way.  Perhaps part of him didn’t want to?  That would bear thinking about later.

            Dean palmed his face.  “Not that.  It’s a figure of speech, Cas.  Come on.  Work with me here.  Do you think he’s lying?”

            Castiel considered.  He could lie, but he found that felt uncomfortable to him.  “I didn’t sense any kind of falsehood to his words.  He could be hiding something from me – demons choose to create cambions because in many ways they are more powerful than full demons and they aren’t restrained by the normal methods that affect demons.  But I’m not aware of any issues regarding truthfulness on his part.”

            The warrior nodded once.  “So I should what, spare him?”

            “His blood makes him an abomination in the eyes of Heaven, Dean.  No angel will suffer his company.”  That wasn’t entirely true.  Castiel wouldn’t mind spending a little more time with the abomination.  The thought itself was a blasphemy, needing re-alignment.  “Your own people loathe him and you yourself don’t trust him.  His life since you parted has been one of pain and misery.  It might be kinder to end his life than to force him to continue living.”  He held up a hand when Dean opened his mouth to object.  “At the same time, you’ve worked for years to find him and now you have him.  You should at least have the opportunity to know your brother and to make your own mind.”

            Dean took a deep, shuddering breath.  Castiel knew he was privileged to see this.  Dean didn’t let many people see him this unguarded, this indecisive.  Bobby Singer might, on rare occasions, might get to see him in a state of anxiety but never this bad.  “Okay.  Okay, I’ll do it.  Thanks, Cas.”

            “I will be right here with you, Dean.”  He tried to smile at his friend, but the gesture felt alien to his features.

            Dean didn’t seem to mind.  He schooled his face back into its usual cocky mask and strode through the maze, back toward the tents.  Castiel trailed along behind him, beige cloak billowing in their wake.

            No one questioned them as they strode into Sam’s tent.  No one would dare to question their commander, even though Castiel could think of at least three different creatures that could masquerade as him right now.  Perhaps they thought that the presence of an angel made tests unnecessary.  Sam looked up from his bed when walked in, then blinked the surprise away from his eyes and sat up when he recognized Dean.

            “Heya, Sammy,” Dean greeted.  He kept his arms by his side, didn’t offer the kind of embrace or handshake or physical affection that Castiel would have expected from other humans in similar situations, but then again there were no similar humans or similar situations.  “I heard you wanted to see me with your own eyes.”

            Sam swallowed.  For a split second, just a fraction of a moment that Castiel almost missed, his hurt showed on his face.  Why should he be hurt?  It wasn’t as though he had any right to expect warmth.  He was tainted, unworthy, and he knew it.  He’d come here to face execution, after all.  “Yeah,” he swallowed, before forcing his face into a neutral expression.  “Yeah.  I did.  You look good.”

            “Thanks.”  Dean took a deep breath.  “So.  It’s been a while.”

            “Yeah.”  Sam’s hazel eyes skittered away from Dean’s and rested on Castiel for a split second, and something bubbled up in the angel’s Grace.  Maybe it was compassion?  “How do you want to do this?”  He slid to the ground, on his knees.  “Less mess to clean up this way, I guess.”

            Dean stared in horror.  “You want me to just cut your throat here and now.”

            Sam shrugged.  “Why wait?”

            “You’re pretty convinced I’m going to kill you at all, Sammy.”  Dean’s face twisted.  “Is there something you want to tell me?”

            “Just that I’ve missed you.”

            Dean snorted.  “Right.  That’s why it took you all this time to come find me.”

            Castiel frowned.  “Dean.  He has been held by Lucifer.  It would not have been easy for him to get away.”

            Dean rewarded him with a flinty stare, and Castiel had to wonder at himself.  Why was he defending the abomination, anyway?  His job was to drive a wedge between the brothers, encourage Dean to do as Sam expected and kill him, not try to broker forgiveness.  

“He still could’ve done it if he’d wanted to.  But hey.  All’s well that ends well, right?”

            “Sure, Dean.”  Sam forced a little smile, eyes clouded.

            “So what is it that you want here?”  Dean grabbed Sam’s chin and tilted his face up to look him in the eye.  “What do you think that Haven has to offer you?”

            Castiel frowned.  They’d been over this already.  Sam blinked.  

“I don’t want anything.  Well, I’d like you to release Meg.  She helped me get away.  Other than that I’ve done everything that I wanted.”

            “Everything, huh?  Got married, had kids, became a cleric –“

            Sam glowered.  “You know that’s all gone now.”

            “Thought you did ‘everything you wanted to do,’ Sammy?”  Dean smirked.  “Because when you were a kid that’s all you ever did.  Pushed at Dad about wanting to be Mr. Normal, get married, have a family of your own, become a cleric or a scholar, live a nice and sedentary life instead of being out there and fighting evil like you were supposed to.”  Dean dropped Sam’s chin like the touch of his brother’s skin burned him.

            Castiel frowned.  He recognized the technique, of course.  He’d seen Dean do it before, using words to cut finer than any of his special knives could.  It wasn’t likely to be something he’d learned in captivity, but it had the desired effect every time.  Castiel had never objected to it before – after all, an aim achieved without bloodshed or physical harm had to be better than the alternative.  Now, however, he found that the words made his Grace sit uneasily within him.  Was it just because they were aimed at Sam?

            “Pretty sure none of that’s feasible anymore.”  Sam glared.  “Just kill me and get it over with, Dean.”

            Castiel stepped forward, ready to intervene.

            “It never was feasible,” Dean said. “No matter how many times Dad and I tried to drive that through your thick skull, you just wouldn’t listen and now look at us.  You’re – whatever the hell you’re supposed to be, and I’m still working off Alastair’s legacy thanks to getting caught while I was out there looking for your sorry ass.”  He shook his head.

            “You can thank John for that.”  Sam stood up.  “If he’d let me go to live with Pastor Jim instead of selling me directly to the thing that killed your mother –“

            Dean punched Sam.  “Dad wouldn’t do that!” he yelled.  “You –“

            Castiel jumped between the brothers.  “It is true, Dean,” he insisted.  “Whatever else is at work here, whatever else must be done, your brother is not lying.”  He’d have to answer for this, for the inappropriate compassion and the disobedience.  Adjustment would be painful, but he never remembered it later so it was of little import.  For now, he needed to keep Dean in control.

            Dean struggled against Castiel’s grip for a moment, then let his arm go limp.  “Yeah.  Yeah, okay.”  He mopped over his face with his newly freed hand.  “So where do we go from here, huh?  I mean, what are we supposed to do?”

            “You put me down,” Sam insisted.  His voice was strong, confident; the voice of a leader.  “You do what you know needs to be done.  I’m a monster.  You kill monsters.”

            Dean’s face twisted again, this time with pain instead of rage or hate.  “What’ve you done that makes you have to die, Sam?  Huh?”

            The cambion glanced away.  When he looked back, his eyes had changed back to gold.  “Isn’t this enough?”

            Dean shuddered.  “It should be.  Have you killed humans?”

            Sam didn’t answer, so Castiel scanned his mind.  “Not who weren’t possessed.  Sam was unable to avoid harming some possessed people, but I’m getting the impression that he’s a skilled exorcist.”  He felt the young man erect some barriers against him, and he placed a hand on the cambion’s bare arm.  “Don’t fight me, Sam.  I’m trying to help you.”

            “Angels don’t help people.”  Sam’s lips folded together.

            Castiel squinted at him, prepared to challenge the creature’s arrogance, but Dean let out a tired little chuckle.  “Most of the time you’re right.  Nine out of ten of them are first-class dicks but Cas here, he’s all right.  He’s the one that pulled me away from Lilith’s band.”

            Sam nodded.  “Thanks for that.”

            Castiel tilted his head.  He wasn’t sure how to respond to that.  On the one hand, he didn’t think that telling Sam that he’d done the deed on orders from Heaven would go over well.  On the other hand, he didn’t know why he cared.

            “Plus,” Dean continued, oblivious to Castiel’s internal war, “I’m told that you’ve met with one angel and he’s not exactly the kind you pray to.”

            Sam’s responding smile could best be described as a rictus.  “I suppose you could, if you wanted,” he offered.  “Just make sure I’m far away.”

            “Not eager to meet up again?” Dean asked with levity that had to be at least partially forced.

            “No.  And I definitely don’t want to see what happens if he gets his hands on you.”  Sam moistened his lips.  “So.”  He glanced at the short sword on Dean’s belt.

            “So.  No little Sammies running around?” Dean leered, waggling his eyebrows.  He’d seen Sam’s glance, Castiel was sure of it, but seemed determined not to say anything about it.

            “No.”  Sam folded his lips together again.  “The tribes are… well, you were out there.  You know.”

            “I was a prisoner.”  A shadow passed over Dean’s face.  “I didn’t exactly get to socialize.”

            Sam nodded.  “The thing is, everyone’s a prisoner out there in the wastelands.  I got to Azazel’s tribe and I tried to make some friends.  Make the best of a bad situation.  You know?  It wasn’t all demons, there.  There were other cambions, a few shifters, a few other creatures.  Any time that I started to get close, attached, to anyone that Azazel didn’t want me getting attached to –“  Sam drew his long finger across his throat.  “I learned pretty quickly not to form attachments after that.”

            “Except to Meg.”  Castiel raised an eyebrow.  “You’re quite attached to her.”

            Sam nodded.  “She’s Azazel’s daughter.  Demons don’t care that Azazel was possessing John Winchester when I was conceived.  The human side of me isn’t important to them except that it makes me less than.  The genetics aren’t important to them.  As far as demons are concerned Meg and I are siblings.”  He shrugged.  “When we were with Azazel I hated her, anyway.”

            “Why?”

            Castiel gleaned the information from Sam when the younger brother wouldn’t speak.  “She was responsible for a lot of his training.”

            “It was only after Azazel was killed and Lucifer absorbed us into the fold that Meg and I got closer.”  Sam shuddered.  “I don’t resent her anymore, not for the way she treated me then.  She was trying to teach me, to train me with abilities that would have become out of control if she hadn’t taught me.  She’s a demon, a full demon, and demons don’t do sweet or gentle.  When she saw me handed over to Lucifer and saw what he did she helped me, until she could help me escape.”

            Dean folded his lips together.  “So you want me to let her go because she tortured you less than someone else.”  A muscle twitched in his jawline.

            “No.  I want you to let her go because she helped me and got me out.”

            “So you could be killed!”  Dean smacked his fist into his open left palm.

            Sam flinched.  “She didn’t know, Dean.”

            Castiel turned to face his friend.  “This is consistent with what I’ve heard from Meg.  She had no idea that he expected execution.  She expected them to both run off and seek freedom with Abaddon’s tribe.”

            Sam spread his hands wide.  “We didn’t exactly discuss the ‘after.’  I pointed out that Abaddon would take her, and she assumed.”

            “That was a little manipulative, there, Sammy.”  Dean glared.

            “She possessed me.  I’d say we’re even.  Just… she doesn’t need to die for this.  I’d never have gotten away from Lucifer if it weren’t for her, and Abaddon’s tribe has almost nothing to do with humans that don’t come looking for them.  Just – please.  Let her go.”

            “Sammy.”  Dean shook his head.  “You know I can’t get away with letting her out.  For that matter I’m not entirely sure what I should do with you.  The council is kind of in a logjam about it.”

            Sam waved a hand.  “You already know what my vote is.”

            Castiel frowned and leaned closer to Sam.  “I realize that you have been cut off from humanity for some time, Sam,” he told the abomination, “but you don’t have a vote on the council.  You aren’t technically a resident of Haven, since you’re not human.”

            A wry grin played around the corners of Sam’s mouth.  “Valid.”

            “You really want me to kill you, Sammy?”  Dean’s voice dropped to a near whisper.

            Sam shrugged.  “What else is there?”

            Dean stepped forward and put a hand out, but pulled it back before he could touch his brother.  “I don’t know.  But we’ll figure it out together.  Just like the good old days, right?”

            Sam gave a hesitant little smile.  It didn’t reach his eyes.

***

            Dean and Castiel returned to the council chamber where the others waited for them.  Missouri Mosley stood up and touched Dean’s face with a gentle hand as soon as he walked into the room.  “Oh, Dean!” Her large, dark eyes gleamed with tears.  “That must have been so painful for you!”  Her eyes dropped to his bloodied knuckles, however, and she reached up and swatted the back of his head.  “That’s how you greet your long lost brother?  Punching him in the face?”

            Pamela snickered.  “They’re Winchesters, Missouri.  They are what they do.”

            Bobby let out a low chuckle at that, even as Jim Murphy and Missouri glared.  “You’re your father’s son alright, Dean.  So.  What’s the verdict?"

            Dean sat back in his chair with a heavy sigh.  “We can’t trust him.  Not for any specific reason, but he is what he is.  Who knows if the sudden change in environment will make him snap, or if Lucifer did something to him that will make him go off at some point in the future?”

            “Which is why we should put him down now,” Pamela insisted.  “It’s not… I mean it’s not the happy ending you always dreamed about with him, but…”

            “We’re Winchesters.  There aren’t any happy endings.  Not for us.”  He wouldn’t look at her, or at Castiel.  “But I don’t think it’s right to just end him because of something that’s not his fault.  If and when he turns, we’ll take him down.  Until then, he’s…”  Dean trailed off, looking for a word to describe a state of being that was wholly unknown to the people of Haven.

            “He shouldn’t be left alone,” Castiel suggested.  “Both because of his origins and because of his mental state.  Everything here will be like a new experience to him; there’s no telling how much of his old life he’ll even remember.  He hasn’t been around humans since he was a teenager and his experiences may leave him frightened or confused.”

            Jim Murphy nodded.  “That makes sense.  I have a room in my home that he can have – the one I’ve been holding for him since your father told me he wanted to be rid of him.”  The priest’s muscles began to relax, slowly.  “I think he’ll be safest there.  Feel safest there, you know?  Holy ground and all that.”

            “Will he even be able to go onto holy ground?” Dean blurted.

            “He always was before,” Missouri snapped.  “He’s still the same boy he ever was –“

            “You can’t know that any better than I can.”  Pamela folded her hands together on the table.  “Something’s blocking him from us both, and you know it.”

            Dean glanced between the women.  “Is that true?”

            Castiel nodded.  “It’s the tattoos.  They were designed to ward him against human psychics.  Some of them were, at any rate.  He was no trouble for me, once I convinced him to allow me in.  I will watch him, Dean.”

            Both Dean and Bobby raised eyebrows.  “Is that a good use of your time?” the latter asked, in a tone that clearly suggested otherwise.

            “It will allow me to understand the dangers he poses in greater depth.  It might also grant me a better insight into Lucifer’s tribe.  He is an angel, but he’s long been exiled from our kind.”  Castiel offered them an attempt at a grin.  “And as I have no need of sleep there will be no need to schedule shifts; simply to send someone to relieve me should I have other duties to attend to.”

            “Well, I’ll be right there,” Jim Murphy said with a huge smile.  He leaned back in his chair.  “This is fantastic news.  Dean, why don’t you show Sammy to the house, while I get his room ready?  It shouldn’t take long; I’ve kept it ready since he was all of what, eight?”

            Castiel moved out into the night.  Dean followed him for a moment.  “I’m going to go talk to Sammy, explain the situation to him,” the warrior informed him.  “He should be happy.  He and the priest always did get along like a house on fire, you know?”

            Castiel did not know, but he nodded anyway.  It seemed to be expected.  “I will inform the demon Meg of the decision.  We can use her as a hostage for his good behavior.  He seems to be attached to her.”

            Dean stared at him for a long moment, and Castiel wondered if his friend had guessed at his attraction toward the foul being.  Then he shrugged.  “Whatever, man.  I guess it can’t hurt.  She probably knows things about Lucifer’s folk, that kind of thing.  She might be useful.”

            Castiel flew to Meg’s cell and admitted himself.  The dark-eyed monster smirked up at him from her cot.  Why she’d been provided a cot mystified him; she needed no sleep.  “Aw, Clarence.  You missed me.”

            He had, but he wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of admitting it.  “The Council has decided to forestall the execution of the abomination – your brother.”  He tugged at his breastplate, a useless gesture.  “For now, at any rate.”

            She raised her eyebrows.  “How did you pull that off?”

            He stepped backwards.  “What makes you think I had any effect on the decision?”

            She snorted.  “Really?  I’m evil, not stupid.  I saw your eyes all over him like flies on shit the moment you walked into the cell where we were being held.  Not that I can blame you.  He’s certainly pretty.  I suppose I should be grateful that you didn’t just reach out and take what you wanted, but maybe normal angels are shy about that sort of thing in public.”

            Angels didn’t blush.  If they did, if they could, his face would be flaming and scarlet right now.  He couldn’t deny that the sight of Sam’s body had been arousing.  The sight of Sam’s bound body had been more arousing, and in ways that should send him to seek revelation and possible adjustment.  Her implication, however, was another thing entirely.  “Angels do not take by force,” he snarled, perhaps a bit harsher than he’d intended.  “We require consent in all things.”

            She frowned and looked up at him, making him feel like a recalcitrant human child.  “Come on, Castiel, you don’t really think that you’re the only angel we’ve met?”

            “Lucifer is hardly representative of our species.  He was cast out and for cause.”   He drew his eyes away from her tattooed arms, which left his eyes to fall to her tattooed legs.  That didn’t help.  He looked at the wall.

            She stood up and walked right over to him, getting into his personal space.  “I wasn’t talking about him and you know it.”

            “If you’re referring to Azazel’s status as one of the Fallen, he was no longer an angel by the time you knew him.”  Castiel cleared his throat.

            “Not where I was going with this either, Halo Boy.”  She thumped a hand onto his chest, tilting her head up to look into his eyes.

            Something inside of Castiel felt dizzy.  “Are you trying to convince me that real angels, people who appear to be aligned with Heaven, have come among your tribe and associated with the Morningstar?”

            “Believe me or don’t.”  She sniffed, a wicked grin splitting her face.  “It’s no skin off my nose.  Ask Samael.  Not, I think, that you’re all that interested in _talk_ when it comes to him.”

            “We had an extensive conversation.  I did not touch him.”  Castiel glared.  “I am an angel and he is –“

            “Right.  As if that’s stopped the thoughts in that pretty little head before.  You’ve never tried a little sulfur-flavored sugar?”  She gave a low, dirty laugh that didn’t repulse him in the least.  “So, tell me, Castiel.  How is it that you managed to screw up convincing Dean to execute our shared baby brother?”

            This time Castiel’s gulp had very little to do with the proximity of the demon.  “You think I was ordered to keep them apart, to encourage him to destroy the abomination?”

            Meg stood on her tiptoes and whispered into his ear, breath hot on his skin.  “I know it.”

            Castiel stepped backward again.  “Why would Heaven so manipulate our champion among the humans?”  There was no possible way for Meg to know that those had been his orders.  Now that he heard them from her point of view, they sounded… impure.  Unrighteous.  

            Meg’s delighted little laugh rang out like bells.  “I can’t do all your thinking for you, Clarence.  You’ve got something between your ears, even if all your blood is rushing south right now.  Where’s Samael?  I bet you’d like for him to go help you take care of that little issue.”  She smirked.

            “Sam is being moved to lodgings with the city priest.”  Cas glanced at her and wondered if he should have disclosed that information.  It wasn’t as though she could escape the cell, after all.  “He will not be left alone at any time, so don’t think that he will be available to release you.”

            She waved a tiny, elegant hand.  “We’ll get there, Castiel.  We’ll get there.”  She stepped back into his space.  “Maybe you’ll be the one to do it.”

            “Highly unlikely.  I’m an angel of the Lord, you’re a demon.”

            She pulled his face down to hers and kissed him.

            Castiel had never kissed someone before.  He was familiar with the theory, of course, and as a near-constant companion of Dean Winchester he was more than familiar with the mechanics but the feel of hot, wet lips or a slippery, demanding tongue was a revelation to him.

            At first he flinched but once his body processed the sensations associated with the act he roughly seized Meg’s head and tangled his fingers into her hair.  He could taste the sulfur ever so slightly at the back of her mouth, and blood, but he could also taste centuries of pain and rage and humor and a bizarre protectiveness for Sam that shocked even her.  He found that he liked kissing, he liked it very much, and he found that it ramped up the _need_ that had been hovering on the edge of his consciousness.

            It was that need – all-consuming, terrifying, devouring – that made Castiel pull himself away.  “What have you done to me?” he gasped, wiping at his mouth with his van brace.  “You’ve bewitched me somehow.”

            She snorted.  “Hardly.  I do know some seductress demons – succubae, that sort of thing – but the kind of magic Azazel’s spawn perform rarely feels good.  And you feel pretty good right now, don’t you Castiel?”  She smirked.  “Go ahead.  Talk to Samael, if you dare.  Watch your finely feathered friends.”  She winked.  “And come back and see me any time, if you don’t think that John Winchester’s mini-me would look kindly on you fraternizing with precious little Sammy.”

            Castiel fled.

            He made his way over to the priest’s house, choosing to walk rather than fly so that he could calm his too-excited blood.  The cool evening gave him some time to reflect on what he’d seen – and done – that evening, reflection that he knew he sorely needed.

            The kissing had been exciting.  It had awakened feelings inside of him that he’d never known he could experience.  Some angels, he knew, partook of matters of the flesh but he had been firmly warned against them by his superiors.   _“Such tawdry rutting is best left to the humans, Castiel,” Zachariah had told him once, as they watched Dean from an invisible perch.  “You see how they are consumed with this need, this urge.  It creates occasions to sin, pathways to doubt.  Do not let yourself be ensnared.”_

            And when he thought about it, those angels who had “become ensnared” were no longer around, were they?  Gabriel, Balthazar, Anael.  None of those names rang out among the Host any longer.  Pathways to doubt indeed.  He would do best to insulate himself from such base instincts, possibly after a good long soak in the chill of the Lawrence River.

            At the same time, he had felt those instincts, and not only tonight.  He’d felt them as soon as he’d laid his eyes on the demonic half-siblings.  When Meg had kissed him he’d thought only of getting more – well, of getting more and of how different it would be if those lips had belonged to Sam.  Meg had said that Azazel’s spawn had no magic that included seduction and he knew of no intelligence that contradicted that, so these must truly be his feelings, his own instincts, his own desires.

            Would Sam also kiss him?

            He frowned at the intrusive thought.  He was not sent to rut his way through Azazel’s unholy spawn.  His mission was to guide and defend the Righteous Man.  Meg could insinuate whatever she wished about angels in league with Lucifer, but he would require more proof than the poisoned words of a demon with her own interests to serve.

            He had brought himself, much calmer now, to the priest’s door.  Light shone out from behind the drawn shutters and Castiel hesitated.   He’d said he would keep guard over the young man, but did he dare?  Knowing that he harbored lust for the creature in his heart, should he not recuse himself from such close contact with Sam?

            He flew inside.  His appearance never startled the priest anymore, even though there was no way that the human could possibly sense him.  Jim Murphy was not alone, of course.  He sat with Missouri Moseley and Sam Winchester at his simple wooden table trying to convince the youth to eat a bowl of what looked like bean stew.  “Good evening, Castiel,” Jim greeted.

            Missouri looked up at him and smirked but said nothing.  She couldn’t possibly know what he’d just been doing with Meg, could he?

            Sam looked at him, then glanced away and stirred the bowl with his spoon.  “So,” he said.  “You’re the one they sent to be my jailer?”

            Cas didn’t like that word.  “It is my responsibility to remain by your side, both for the protection of Haven and for your protection,” he affirmed, hands behind his back.  He took in Sam’s form and repressed a shudder.  “Have you consumed anything since your arrival?  I know I ordered water sent to you.”

            Sam gave a listless shrug.  “You saw Meg.”

            Now Castiel gave a start.  “You can see that?”

            Sam let his eyes flash golden, just for a second, and twisted his lips into a smirk.  “She’s safe, then.”

            “You’re devoted.”  He swallowed as Sam looked away from him.  “Sam, have you… encountered… angels other than Lucifer?”

            “Of course.”  He shrugged.  “Why would I not have?”

            “Who were they?”

            Sam gave a bitter little laugh, still not meeting anyone’s eyes.  “It’s not like they gave their names.  Why do you want to know?”

            “If there are traitors in the ranks, they must be reported.”  He stepped forward.  “They must be adjusted.”

            Sam snorted.  “I’m tired.  I’d like to get some sleep.”


	4. I Can See You're Trapped In A Maze

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Castiel receives a fairly emphatic pink slip.

Sam lay himself down on the bed, somewhat gingerly.  He lay atop the bedclothes, not underneath them, and Castiel frowned.  “Do you require assistance, Samuel?”

            “It’s Sam.  And no.  Thank you.”

            “You will be warmer underneath the blankets.”

            Sam opened one eye.  “Thanks for that.”   He closed it again.

            Castiel watched as his charge drifted off, outsized limbs barely contained by the narrow bed.  He looked uncomfortable.  As his sleep deepened, the mortal’s eyebrows drew together and his face pinched with an expression of the deepest consternation.  “No,” he groaned.  “I won’t.”

            A small jug of water, left on the bedside table, began to shake.

            Castiel hesitated.  Dean hated it when Castiel intervened in his sleep.  He said that it was invasive and intrusive and “disturbing.”  At the same time, Dean was not a telekinetic.  Who knew what kind of havoc Sam could wreak while in the throes of his nightmares?  Castiel reached forward and touched two fingers to the young man’s furrowed brow, smiling in satisfaction as it smoothed out.

            Sam slept for two days.  Dean came over on the second, to “make sure that my brother hasn’t burned the place down or anything,” and his face became alarmingly red when he learned that his brother was still asleep.  “How the hell is he still asleep?  It’s been two days!”

            “Nightmares were a problem.”  Castiel explained what he’d done and why.  “I told his body to sleep until it was rested.  Clearly it has been some time since he’s gotten a full night’s sleep.  He must have needed it.”

            Jim grimaced.  “He needs things like food and water, too, Castiel.”  He shook his head and put a hand on the angel’s shoulder as he got to his feet.  “Maybe you should wake him up?”

            Dean followed Castiel to Sam’s room.  “You can’t just mess with people like that, Cas,” he growled.  “People need to dream, they need to get that stuff out of their system.”

            “He is not like you, Dean.  His nightmare was affecting the outside world.”  Castiel woke Sam with a touch to his face.

            The effect was instantaneous, and there was no drowsy period.  One moment Sam was unconscious, the next Castiel found his wrist encircled by a vice-like grip.  He found that he didn’t mind.   “What’s going on?”  Sam’s eyes flashed yellow as Castiel found his entire body restrained by a force he couldn’t see.

            “Easy, tiger,” Dean chuckled, holding his hands up.  “Cas here decided you needed your beauty sleep, so he decided to ‘help.’  You’ve been out for two days.  You’re probably hungry.”

            Just like that, the hand and the invisible force fell away.  Castiel wouldn’t have minded the hand staying.  “Two days?”

            Castiel wouldn’t apologize.  “You were exhausted.”

            Sam blinked, letting his eyes return to their normal hazel color.  “I suppose I was.”  He hoisted himself into a sitting position.  “Thank you.  I suppose.”

            Dean’s shoulders relaxed, and he gave a little grin.  “I guess you did need it, then.  I brought some clothes by, Gigantor.”  He hefted a small bag.  “It’s not a lot but at least you’ll be able to get the stuff you’re wearing cleaned up.”

            Sam’s skin reddened for a moment.  “Thanks, Dean,” he murmured, looking away.  “I appreciate it.”

            Dean darted his green eyes over to Castiel.  “You can take a break for a few hours, Cas.  I’ll hang out with Sam.  I know some people who are looking forward to seeing him again, like Bobby Singer.  And I know Jim’s antsy about pouring some food into him, too.”

            Castiel recognized his dismissal and nodded before flying away.  It had been some time since he’d reported to his superiors; he would take advantage of the opportunity now.

            Zachariah was, as expected, cross about the elapsed time.  “I thought you had Fallen!” the senior seraph snapped.  “You know that your mission is of the utmost importance to Heaven!”

            Castiel explained himself.  At least, he explained himself as far as he dared.  “The Righteous Man required that his brother be watched at all times.  Who better to watch him than one who needs neither rest nor fuel?”  He spread his hands slightly.  “It seemed to be the most expedient way of fulfilling the mission you set.”  He kept his eyes downcast and submissive.

            Zachariah harrumphed.  “Well.”  He had little to complain about from that standpoint.  “And what is the status of that mission, Castiel?”

            “Dean Winchester is wary of Samuel.  He holds residual anger over his brother’s resistance to their father and over his disappearance.”  Only one of those was at all Sam’s fault, and even that was questionable, but that didn’t matter to Dean and it didn’t matter to Zachariah.  “He is not yet ready to kill him, but he does not pay his words any heed.”

            The older angel sneered.  “Of course not.  Who would?  Demons lie, Castiel.”

            “Oftentimes, yes, sir.”  Of course, a demon would cheerfully tell the truth if it suited that demon’s purposes, if it caused enough pain.  Meg had told John Winchester the absolute truth about Sam’s origins, after all.

            “It is well,” Zachariah sniffed finally.  “You are dismissed.”

            Castiel flew away.  He checked invisibly on Dean and Sam, but didn’t interfere with their visit to Bobby Singer.  He would have preferred to be the one standing there with the abomination – the young man, he corrected himself.  He would not have let Sam stand alone and forlorn near the door while exchanging hugs with the older man.  He would have put a hand on his arm and brought him fully into the room, urged him to be part of the conversation.

            He had not disclosed his unangelic feelings to Zachariah, not his feelings toward Meg and not his feelings toward Sam.  This was wrong.  He knew that he should have made a full confession, gone for adjustment and experienced the comfort of correction.  Angels should not allow themselves to feel sexual or romantic attraction, and certainly not toward demons or their spawn.  He had concealed his defects from Zachariah.  Why had he sinned in this way?

            He walked over to the prison and visited Meg.  

“My hero,” she greeted with a magnificent eye roll, not bothering to get up off her cot.  “Or are you here to try your luck on me too?”

            Castiel frowned.  “You’ve had other visitors?”

            “A couple of the guards decided to try to get frisky.”  She smirked.  “You need to talk to Dean-o about training his Hunters.  Seems his little boy toys didn’t get the memo.  I can’t leave the devil’s trap.  I’m not some helpless, fainting flower.”

            Castiel’s hands shook.  “Did they try to harm you?”

            “They’re hunters, moron.  I’m a demon.  What do you think?”  She sat up and tossed her hair over her shoulder.  “I only maimed one of them before they got the subtle hint, though.”

            “I’m sorry, Meg.  I’ll speak to Dean about that.  The men involved will be disciplined.  I’ll do it myself.”

            She stared at him for a moment.  “I think you will,” she murmured and looked away.  “So what brings you by?  I thought you’d forgotten all about little old me.”

            “You’re difficult to forget, Meg.”

            She gave a low chuckle that made him feel as though he wore too much clothing again.  “Flatterer.”

            “I am incapable of flattery for its own sake.  Your brother is very stubborn.”

            She snorted.  “Tell me about it.  He wouldn’t say ‘yes’ no matter what Lucifer did.  Didn’t matter what Lucifer offered him, didn’t matter what Lucifer did to him, he wouldn’t give in.  He could have united the Tribes, you know.”

            Castiel gasped.  “One man to unite all of the demonic tribes?”  The thought was almost too much to grasp.  “Even Lucifer hasn’t been able to do that, and he created you!”

            “Right?  It’s what Samael was created for.  An angel can’t do it, because you inherently hate us.  A demon couldn’t do it, because it’s not in our nature.  But someone like him – not fully demon, but with the blood of the Fallen and a human – he could do it.”

            “Humanity couldn’t stand against it.”  Castiel swallowed.

            “Heaven couldn’t stand against us either,” she pointed out, leaning close.  He could see down her tunic, see her small breasts with her dark nipples.  The enormity of her words made the view almost incidental.  “We would have marched right up to Heaven and torn it down.  And there wouldn’t have been anything you halos could have done about it.”  She grinned, wicked and triumphant.

            He drew back slightly.  “How did that not happen?”

            “You would need to ask him that, sugar.”  She slouched back.  “If I knew, I could have told Lucifer and we could have fixed it.  That was the plan, though.  Lucifer’s plan, I mean.  It took decades, right?  First he had to convince Mary Campbell to make a deal.  Then Azazel had to possess John, and believe me when I tell you that wasn’t as easy as it sounds.  Mary had been a warrior, you know.”  She sat back up and moved, lighting-fast, to straddle Castiel.

            He had no idea how to respond to that, so he put his hands on her hips.  “She was known to Heaven,” he confirmed.  “She was the mother of the Righteous Man, after all.”

            She cackled.  “That she was.”  She rolled her hips, sending a whole wave of new sensations through his body.  “Anyway.  Then Daddy Dearest had to get his hands on Samael.  Then there was the training, indoctrination.  All that work for Sam to just keep looking him in the eye and telling him, ‘No.’”  She shook her head.  “The kid is something else.”

            “But… he might yet say yes.”  Castiel struggled to focus on the story she was telling.

            “If I thought he would say yes, I would never have helped him get away.”  She stroked his face.  “I’d have followed him, as the Boy King.  He won’t do that.  It’s up to you to figure out why.  I don’t care.”

            He tilted his head to the side.  “I think you do.  Otherwise you wouldn’t have mentioned it.”  He didn’t understand why she insisted on using her body on him the way she did, but he supposed that he was just as capable of playing that game as she was.  He pulled her face down and kissed her, rough and messy.

            She grabbed his hair and tugged as she responded to the kiss, making a delighted little sound in the back of her throat as she opened her mouth to him.  “Why Castiel,” she gasped when she pulled back, not letting go of his hair.  “You’re a quick study, aren’t you?”

            “You do care why that plan failed.  You want to know why.”  He squeezed her hip with the one hand that was still there.

            “Maybe.”  She shrugged.  “I’m curious.  It doesn’t change the fact that it didn’t work.”  She trailed a hand down the front of his tunic.  “We could distract one another for a little while, move some furniture around.”

            He frowned.  “There is very little furniture to move.  And I am concerned about consent issues while you are a prisoner.”

            She leaned back, releasing his hair.  “For real?”

            “Angels require consent.”  He saw her open her mouth and laid a finger on it.  “Whatever you may have seen from some rebellious angels in camp, angels who take their role seriously must venerate the rule of consent.”  He eased her off of his lap, much to the chagrin of his body.  “Perhaps if things were different –“

            She smirked.

            “Can I bring you anything, Meg?”

            She pouted for a moment.  “A book or two would be nice,” she sighed at last.  “It’s duller than the bottom of a well in here, and believe me, I’d know.”

            Castiel took his leave before he could forget his concerns.

            He made his way back toward the priest’s residence, but as he walked he became aware of a presence behind him.  He barely felt it, but it tugged at his Grace just enough to make him aware.

            He ducked into a back alley and turned to see whether the person who had so caught his attention might have followed him.  For a moment, there was nothing.  Then he felt another angel’s Grace flash into view as Virgil swooped in, sword raised and stabbing down.

            Castiel summoned his own blade and parried in time, but only just.  The metals scraping against each other sent sparks showering across the dank alley as the angels sprang apart from each other.  “Virgil!” Castiel ordered.  “Stand down!”

            Virgil did not stand down.  He attacked again instead.

            Castiel ducked under the blow and punched him in the face.  He didn’t want to kill Virgil, not if he could possibly avoid it.  Angels weren’t supposed to harm one another.  Clearly Virgil was in the wrong, and he needed to be brought for confession and adjustment, but that didn’t mean that he needed to die.  It wasn’t as if their numbers could be replenished, after all.

            At the same time, it is difficult to fight someone who intends to kill when one prefers to avoid bloodshed.  Castiel knew that he was a skilled fighter, but it was all he could do to hold Virgil off without killing him.  Subduing him was looking like it might be impossibility.  The pair took to the skies as Castiel tried to get away and Virgil tried to execute him.

            Castiel felt his enemy’s blade slash through one of his wings and crashed to the ground, Virgil hot on his heels.  He lifted a weak arm to parry the blow, knowing that it probably wouldn’t be enough, but the blow never came.

            The nearby wall cracked slightly as something slammed Virgil into it at high velocity.  The enemy angel howled, shrieking vile imprecations against Castiel and against Samuel Winchester in his true voice until something choked him off in the middle of his rant.

            Castiel lifted his head.  Three figures stood at the end of the alley.  One loomed over the others: Sam Winchester, one tattooed arm held out to show an upraised hand.  His lip curled, just a bit, and his eyes had turned golden.  Dean stood just in front of him, sword at the ready.

            Beside them stood an angel Castiel hadn’t ever thought he’d see again.  As tall as Castiel, he glanced sardonically at the mortals before shaking his head at the angels.  “That’s about enough out of you,” Balthazar said to Virgil.  “Cassie, are you alright?”

            “I’ll live,” Castiel told him.

            Balthazar pursed his thin lips for a second, and then turned to Sam.  “Can you hold him there for a minute?”

            Dean shook his head.  “No.”

            Sam ignored his brother.  “I can hold him here all day if you want me to.”

            Blue eyes rolled.  “I’m sure I can come up with much better uses for your time.  I’ll be back in a flash.”  Balthazar disappeared and then returned with an etched platinum coronet.  “Here we go.  This will keep him quiet and grounded until we can get him someplace more suitable.”

            Dean turned baleful eyes onto Balthazar as the angel brought the restraining device onto the assailant’s head.  “And you are?”  Virgil struggled, but he couldn’t do much.

            Sam lowered his arm once the restraint was in place and rushed to help Castiel.  “Are you alright?” he asked, strong hands helping to maneuver the angel to his feet.  “Guys, I think he’s hurt pretty bad.”

            “It’s my wing,” Castiel gasped.  “It’s the only thing that I can’t heal myself.  Dean, Sam, this is Balthazar.  Balthazar, these are Dean and Sam Winchester.  We can worry about my wing later.  We need someplace discrete to take Virgil, and quickly.”

            “Meg’s cell,” Sam suggested immediately.  

            Dean turned to face him.  “No way.”

            Castiel nodded.  “Actually, Dean, that may be a good idea.  Temporarily, at least.  It’s large, and it’s remote.  You can give us discretion.”

            Dean scowled, but under the circumstances he couldn’t raise any other objections.  He, too, could understand the need for speed even if he didn’t understand all of the reasons right now.  “Fine,” he said, turning to point at Sam.  “But if it all goes pear-shaped and she gets out, I’m blaming your sorry ass.”

            Sam nodded, eyes downcast.  Castiel spared a second to wonder about that before he had to grab on to Virgil and help fly him to Meg’s cell.  Agony ripped through his Grace with every movement, but he didn’t have a choice.  They couldn’t stay out in the open like this.

            Meg, needless to say, was surprised by the sudden appearance of three angels in her little abode.  “I asked for books,” she reminded him.  “Not a pretty boy and a – well, what are you?  Hamburger?”  She sprang to her feet and seized Virgil’s sagging chin, examining his face.  “Oh, here now.  I remember you, sugar.  I remember you real well.”  She patted his cheek a couple of times.

            Balthazar’s eyes widened.  “Cassie, why does a demon ‘remember’ an angel?”  He walked over to Castiel and put a hand on the injured wing, healing it.

            Balthazar had always been a skilled healer – skilled with his hands in many ways, come to think of it.  “I have my suspicions,” Castiel said with a sigh, enjoying the touch, “but I think we ought to wait for the Winchesters.  Dean dislikes being left out of things.”

            Meg smirked.  “I always did like the smart ones.”

            “The bigger question here is what are you doing alive?”  Castiel turned to face Balthazar.  “We all mourned you – none, I think, more than I did.”

            Balthazar’s face fell.  “I’m sorry, Castiel.  I am.  I will explain perhaps a little later, hm?”  He tilted his head toward Meg.

            Meg sat back on her bed and leaned back, making a show of crossing her legs.  “Oh don’t mind me.  Pretend I’m furniture or something.”

            “Meg is… nominally trustworthy.”  Castiel folded his arms across her chest.  “I am happy to see you brother – please don’t think I’m not – but I believe I’m owed more explanation than that.”

            Balthazar sighed.  “Our Father isn’t there, Castiel.”

            Castiel shook his head.  “No.  We have our orders, they come from our Father, He relays them to Michael, who passes them along to the others as he sees fit.  There is a hierarchy for a reason.”  Castiel sighed and gripped his brother’s arm.

            “No, Castiel.  Our Father left the building a long time ago.  Our Father instructed us to guard humanity, to love them.  Not to manipulate them, to destroy them.”  He cuffed Virgil on the back of the head.  “I saw things.  I learned things.  And I couldn’t, in good conscience, follow those orders.  So – I found a convenient body, dressed it up with the appropriate residual Grace and such, and have been thoroughly enjoying my life ever since.”

            Meg put a finger on her chin.  “Interesting.  Would those orders happen to have centered around the creation of a specific cambion?”

            Balthazar shifted, as though his elegant garments were suddenly uncomfortable.  “Perhaps.”

            She turned proud eyes toward Castiel.  “See?”

            The door opened.  “Alright.  We’re here.”  Dean strode into the room, head high.  He spared Meg one contemptuous glare, but otherwise ignored her.

            Sam, on the other hand, crossed immediately to his sister.  “Are you okay?” he murmured, placing his hands on her shoulders and looking her over.

            “I’m fine, Sam.”  She grinned.  “A little surprised to find my little cell full of angels, but hey – I’ve always liked living dangerously.  How’d you get all mixed up in this?”

            “Vision,” he shrugged.

            She made a face.  “You’ve probably got a killer headache.”

            He waved a giant hand.  “Whatever.”  A pink tongue moistened his lips.  Castiel found himself suddenly reminded how much he wanted to taste that tongue.  “Do you, uh, want me to leave or something?  I can go get Pastor Jim, or Bobby Singer.”

            “Sit down, Sammy,” Dean ordered, eyes glued to Virgil.  “Alright.  We’ve got ourselves a rogue angel.  Feel like letting on why you decided you were going to try to get all stabby with Cas?”

            Virgil raised his head and carefully spat at Dean.

            Meg’s eyes narrowed.  “Samael, would you care to give our guest a demonstration of what happens when people forget their manners?”

            Cas watched as Sam took a deep breath.  Virgil snorted, but then the angel grimaced.  After a second he groaned, and then his face contorted in pain.  “It was on orders,” he gasped after a few seconds of ragged breathing.  “It was orders.  Nothing personal.”

            “Whose?” Dean snapped.

            Castiel didn’t need Sam to hurt Virgil to get that answer from him.  “Raphael,” he informed them.  “Virgil is Raphael’s servant.  He doesn’t scratch his nose without orders from Raphael.”

            “I’m an angel,” Virgil sneered.  “I shouldn’t have any itches that need scratching.  Should I, Castiel?”

            His meaning was perfectly clear to Castiel, but he didn’t deign to respond.  “Why would Raphael want Castiel dead?” Balthazar frowned.  “Castiel is a good and loyal soldier.”

            “Is he?”  Virgil sneered.  “I could smell the demoness on him when I approached him.”

            Dean and Balthazar turned to stare at him.  Meg just shrugged.  “He came to ask me about Lucifer’s organization, what Lucifer wanted with Samael.  Don’t get your braes in a knot.”

            Dean stared at him for a moment longer before shrugging.  “Hey, man.  Whatever.  Not what I thought you’d go for, but she is hot.  I guess.”  He blinked.  “Not the point.  Why were you trying to kill Castiel?”

            Virgil sneered.  Sam’s eyes narrowed, and the prisoner cried out.  “He was moving too slowly!”

            “With what?” Dean asked.

            “His mission.”  A sweat had broken out on Virgil’s forehead, and angels weren’t supposed to sweat.  “I don’t know what that was.  But they told me that he was moving too slowly, they were worried that his ‘affection’ for the Righteous Man had compromised his loyalty and that he needed to be eliminated.”

            Dean looked over at Castiel.  “Do you feel ‘affection’ for me, Cas?”

            “We do share a profound bond,” Castiel said over the numbness settling over him.  “Raphael ordered my… my execution?”

            “Looks that way, Castiel.”  Virgil smirked at him.  “You were moving too slowly.  When has that ever happened before?  Face it.  You are compromised.  You were too worried about your precious Dean Winchester and your precious humans to be concerned about what Heaven needed and wanted.”

            Castiel staggered.  Sam was there in a moment, keeping him upright.  Part of Castiel could appreciate that – the cambion barely knew him but this was the second time that he’d reached out for Castiel, reached out to provide comfort and check on his well-being.

            “You’re holding back on us, fly boy.”  Meg approached Virgil as Castiel sagged off to the side.  “You’ve been to Lucifer’s camps.  More than once.  I remember you.”

            Virgil shook his head.  “I’m loyal to Heaven.  What would a loyal angel have to do with the Lightbringer?”

            Dean’s entire body went still.  “Is she telling the truth, Sammy?”

            Sam looked away and then nodded, a slow, terrible gesture.

            “Do you want to get a few licks in?”  Dean’s tone was casual.  His eyes were not.

            Sam’s eyebrows drew together in confusion for a second, and then he shook his head.  “No.  Thanks.  I don’t want to – I mean.  No.”  He took a deep, shuddering breath and pulled his hand back from Castiel.  “You okay now?”

            Castiel mourned the loss of Sam’s hands, but he no longer needed the physical support.  “I will not fall, Sam.”  He handed his sword over to Dean.  “Do what you will.”

            Dean stepped forward, blade at the ready.  For a second, a terrible blankness came over his eyes.  Castiel knew that he’d been in this position before: a restrained prisoner, a blade.  An audience.  Castiel might need to intervene – not out of any particular fondness for the man who had wanted to kill him, but because Dean didn’t need to torture him.  He didn’t need that stain on his soul.

            Sam, despite the long separation, seemed to recognize what was going on.  “Dean,” he said in a soft tone.

            Dean shook his head and his eyes cleared.  He stabbed through Virgil’s heart in one swift, hard blow, resulting in an explosion of Grace and the imprint of charred wings on the now-broken devil’s trap on the cell floor.

            Balthazar grabbed the body and disappeared, returning seconds later.  The conspirators exchanged glances.  “Alright.”  Dean blew out an explosive breath, wiping the blood off Castiel’s blade and passing it back to him.  “So.  That happened.”

            Castiel swallowed.  “Yes.  It did.”

            Balthazar stepped forward.  “Let me make sure that I’m hearing this right.  Virgil, who was the favorite pet toad for Raphael, whom I fondly remember as Michael’s favorite pet toad, was a repeat guest in _Lucifer’s_ camp?”

            Sam shuddered.  “Got it in one.”

            “Does anyone else see this as an incredibly large problem or is it just me?”  Balthazar gestured and a goblet appeared in his hand.  He drank deeply from it.

            Dean scowled.  “What, no sharing?”  He sighed.  “Yeah.  This is a problem.”  He turned to Meg.  “If you know anything else, sister, you better start sharing.”

            She laughed.  “I know plenty.  It’s just not all that useful.  You think angels share their names with demons?  I knew that sack of crap as soon as I saw him, Deanie, but I had to actually _see_ him.  But since he said that the conspiracy went pretty high up, I’m guessing that we have a big issue.”

            “I feel that this would be a good time to disclose my secret orders from Zachariah,” Castiel announced.  “Given that I was nearly executed for not carrying them out fast enough.”

            Dean glanced at him.  “You think we should maybe get someplace we can angel-proof first?  Who knows what reports he managed to get back before Balty got that contraption onto him.”

            Balthazar rolled his eyes.  “Don’t call me that.  Ever.  As it happens I might have a cave.  I’ll need to alter the wards slightly – give me a moment.”  He disappeared and reappeared again.  “Shall we go?”

            Castiel grabbed Meg around the waist.  Dean shook his head.  “She’s a demon, Cas.  We can’t trust her!”

            “She’s already helped us once,” Castiel reminded him.  “And she has intelligence we need.”

            “I’ve already shown you that I’m not going to just let someone hurt my brother,” she pointed out.  “And I’m invested in Feathers here too.  So can we get out of here before someone comes looking for him?”

            Dean’s face twisted.  “Fine.  I don’t like this, but fine.”  He took Castiel’s other hand, while Sam took Balthazar’s.  Castiel had to fight a surge of jealousy.

            Castiel had expected a small outcrop, dank and dark.  Balthazar’s cavern proved to be more like an underground palace, with multiple chambers, natural lighting reflected down from the surface, and multiple underground springs bubbling up pure clean water.  “This is beautiful, Balthazar,” Sam told him, eyes wide with awe.

            “Thank you, Sam.”  The renegade angel gestured, and the guests seated themselves on lavish cushions.  “It’s good to know that someone has taste.”  He passed the youngest of them a polished stone goblet that hadn’t been there before.  “So.  Cassie.  It seems like you were going to tell us about some secret orders from the eternally charming Zachariah?”

            Dean frowned, scratching his head.  “Was he the balding guy?  Because he was kind of a dick.”

            “That narrows it down,” Meg muttered.

            “You have met him, Dean, and I believe that you did pronounce him to be a ‘dick’ at the time.  His initial instructions were that Sam was to be smote immediately.”

            Both Meg and Dean startled.  Then they glared at each other.  “Care to share anything about why he gave that order, chuckles?” Dean ground out from between clenched teeth.

            “He didn’t share, beyond the obvious.”  Castiel sighed.  “I should have pressed, but angels are not given to questioning.”

            “It’s true.  Probing at the reason for orders tends to get a person sent for ‘adjustment.”  Balthazar shuddered.

            “But now that we know that angels – angels associated with Zachariah – were involved with Lucifer, and we know what Lucifer wanted to do, I have to think that the order came because Sam would have been able to identify them if he saw them.”  Castiel hung his head.  “It never occurred to them that Meg would have been allowed to live.  I advised holding back on executing Sam, telling them that it would be detrimental to our relationship with you, Dean, to do so without your say-so.  So he urged me to discourage reconciliation.”  He shuddered.  “I can only imagine what their goal was.”

            “To kill Sam, or to drive him back into the fold, of course.”  Meg put a protective hand on Sam’s arm.  “If he found that there was nothing here for him either, he might have gone back.”

            “Never,” Sam growled.

            “I know that.  You know that,” she said, stroking his arm with a softness Castiel wouldn’t have expected from a demon.  “They don’t think much of you, so they wouldn’t have added that to their planning.”

            “Sam, I am sorry.”  He rose and moved closer to the siblings.  “I had faith that their orders came from God, but now – well.”

            One of Sam’s hands, the one attached to the arm that Meg wasn’t holding, reached out to land on Castiel’s shoulder.  “It’s okay, Cas,” he said in a soft and gentle voice.  “You didn’t know.  I mean the orders made sense at the time, right?  There was no reason to question them.”

            Castiel looked up into Sam’s shining kaleidoscope eyes.  He’d always heard – from humans – about his Father’s forgiveness.  He saw it here, in Sam Winchester.  “Thank you, Sam.”

            Meg brushed her free hand against Cas’ other arm, and for a moment they formed a perfect little triangle.  Castiel might have lost Heaven and the Host today, but right now he felt perfect and complete.


	5. They've Got Us Locked Into Their Sights

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I do love it when a plan comes together.

Balthazar cleared his throat.  “I do so hate to interrupt, darlings, but we still have the little matter of figuring out what to do about this whole angelic corruption business.  Not that I have any kind of moral issue with certain types of angelic corruption, mind you.  In fact, there’s a water nymph not too far away from here –“

            “Angharad?” both Sam and Meg asked at the same time.  The siblings looked at each other, Meg in astonishment, Sam in vague embarrassment.  “Seriously, Sam?” Meg sighed.

            Balthazar rolled his eyes.  “As a matter of fact, yes.  Should I carry any messages from you two?”

            Sam tugged at his collar.  “Er, no, I’m good.”

            Meg’s cheeks pinkened.  “Nope.  All set.”

            Dean shook his head.  “I don’t even want to know.  Anyway.  Right.  Angelic corruption of the world-shattering kind, not the dirty business kind.”  He cringed.  “Why would angels want to work with Lucifer?”

            Castiel let out a heavy sigh and sat back down.  “They’ve been claiming all along that our orders came from Father.  Balthazar tells me that our Father is no longer involved with Heaven.  Perhaps they think that Lucifer’s punishment is unjust?”

            Sam shook his head.  “The angels who came to him didn’t seem all that fond of him.  They wanted a fight, eventually.”

            “You,” Meg said, pointing at him.  “With you at the head of an army of demons, Lucifer could storm Heaven.”

            Dean glowered.  “But we’ve established that he’s not going to do that,” he said, enunciating every word.

            “Right, right.  But they don’t care.”  Balthazar sneered, leaning forward.  “In the eyes of most angels – almost all, I’d say – humans are tools, no more.  You don’t ask your sword how it feels before you go sticking it into someone’s belly, do you?  Well neither does an angel ask a human about how he feels before he sends the human to do his bidding.  Just like they didn’t ask you, Dean, before they let you rot with Alastair.”

            “Excuse me?”  Dean’s face took on that still, fake smile he got when he was about to explode.

            “Heaven knew exactly where you were, Dean.  They knew what was happening to you.  They chose not to send in a rescue mission until you had received the ‘training’ they wanted you to receive.”  He made a vague circular gesture.  “It’s why I left.  Part of the reason.  They planted the suggestion that Sam was there and let you get caught, they let you be tortured, just so that you could have that delightful experience.”

            Castiel didn’t think that his mouth could go dry – as an angel, his body was an artificial construct and not subject to such matters.  Still, the sensation was there, and off-putting.  “But we were supposed to guard humanity!  Protect them!  Protect them from demons!” he railed.

            “Bang-up job there.”  Dean’s hands were in fists at his side.

            Sam passed his goblet over to him.  “Dean.  Castiel still got you out.  Right?”

            Dean took a deep breath.  Cas waited.  His friend clearly had a lot that he wanted to say – his jaw twitched, his eyes blazed – but after he licked his lips he just nodded and sipped from the goblet.  “Yeah.  Yeah.  I got it.  I’m here.  Cas couldn’t have known the score –“

            “I had no idea that you had been allowed to suffer for so long, Dean,” Castiel promised.  “I didn’t.”

            “I know you didn’t, Cas,” Dean said, not looking at him.  “I know.  Let’s not worry about the past right now, okay?  Let’s just… let’s just focus on what’s happening now and what’s coming for us.”

            Castiel nodded.  “So.  If they weren’t in favor of Lucifer’s restoration, what could they have wanted?”

            Sam shook his head and gave a little laugh.  “They wanted their father.”

            Everyone looked at him in confusion, Castiel included.  “Excuse me?” Balthazar asked, speaking for all.

            “Isn’t it obvious?” Sam asked, even though it clearly wasn’t.  “It was definitely God’s decision to cast Lucifer out of Heaven, which left him to create demons from humans.  If he’s gone missing, what’s the one thing that they would think would bring him home faster than anything else?”

            “More fighting between Michael and Lucifer,” Castiel nodded as understanding dawned.  “Lucifer was expelled for fighting with Michael, so letting him take on Michael again would be about the best way to get God’s attention.”

            “And Lucifer – well, he’s going along with it because he’s angry with God, he wants his Father’s attention.”  Sam shivered for a moment.  “I suppose I can understand that.”

            “Really?” Balthazar raised an eyebrow.

            “It’s all I wanted, when I was a kid.”  He shrugged.  “When you’re not the favorite, it’s – well, it’s hard.  I get why, now.  It’s a different situation, I know that, but before I knew – well.  I’d have done anything to get John’s attention, get his approval for something I could be good at.”

            Castiel reached out to Sam.  “It is not your fault, Sam.”  He took Sam’s hand, just for a second, and gave it a tiny squeeze.

            “I know.”  His voice was quiet, almost inaudible.  “Thanks.”  He lifted his head.  “Anyway.  I don’t know if it goes as high as Michael or not.  I do know that Lucifer was the only archangel we ever had in camp.  They feel different, you know?”

            Castiel and Balthazar both nodded.  “It’s true.  We would.”  Balthazar sighed.  “Alright.  Dean, you’re the commander.  What is it that you want to do?”

            “Me?”  He blinked.  “This is so far out of my league.  I mean, we’re going up against Heaven here.”  He shook his head.  “But then again, Heaven’s kind of been up against us from the beginning, right?”  He sighed.  “Alright.  First things first.  Hunter Legion is on our side.  We’re going to have some problems.  Some guys aren’t going to be keen on the whole…”  He gestured to Meg and Sam.  “I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it myself, to be honest.  We’ll get some folks leaving.”

            Castiel nodded, and Sam licked his lips.  “There are some others – but I don’t think Hunter Legion would be excited about working with them, anymore than they’d be about working with Meg and me.”  He grimaced.

            “I’m in, obviously,” Meg said with a toss of her head.  “I can try to make contact with Abaddon’s people and see how they feel about going up against both Lucifer and Heaven.  They’re usually pretty reluctant to get involved with anything that involves people, but we’ll see.”

            Sam winced.  “Crowley’s people are an option, too, if we’re going that route.  We’d have to keep them separate from Abaddon’s folks, but that shouldn’t be that hard.”

            “I hate Crowley.”  Meg wrinkled her nose.  “Anyone but Crowley.  And he’s been dying to get a piece of that fine ass of yours for years.”

            “That won’t be necessary,” Castiel interrupted.  “You hate him and we don’t need to peddle Sam.”

            Sam flashed him a quick smile, just a little bit of dimples, but it made Castiel’s day.

            Dean did not smile.  “What are the odds we could pull this off without calling in a demonic cavalry?”

            “Slim to none,” Balthazar admitted cheerily.  “Hunter Legion is good, but you’ve been in bed with angels for a long time.  Many of your father’s ‘insights’ were inspired by angels, after all.”

            “Son of a bitch,” Dean whined.

            “I have a few people I can call on,” Balthazar suggested, “but most of them are like me – in hiding, for a reason.”  He smirked.  “Even the prettiest of pretty boys isn’t going to be enough to get them to enter the fray, especially if Cassie keeps getting all territorial over him.”  He winked at Sam, who looked confused.

            “Great,” Dean muttered.  “Anyway, I need to talk with the Council at Haven and see what they want to do.  They’ll have an opinion, you can count on that.”

            “Would it be helpful to bring us in?” Castiel asked.

            Dean considered.  “Ye-es.  You, I think, definitely, Cas.  They know you and they trust you.  Balty, you look like a velvet vendor exploded.  I don’t know if they’ll even believe that you’re an angel.”

            “Well you could always call me ‘Balty’ again, and I could smite you in front of them,” Balthazar offered.  “That should go some way toward convincing them.”

            Dean smirked at him, but returned to a serious expression quickly.  “The biggest question is, how do we hide Castiel here from more feathery assassins?  They’re going to figure out pretty quick that Virgil didn’t come back.”

            Balthazar opened his robe, revealing silken braies, very pale flesh and some intricate glyphs tattooed onto his chest.  “Enochian,” he identified.  “I can put them on with a thought, if you’d like.  You’ll be hidden from any angel.”  He glanced at the rest of them.  “I can do the rest of you as well, if you’d like.”

            “I think that makes good sense,” Castiel nodded, rising.

            It didn’t hurt, but he didn’t expect it to.  None of the others were strangers to pain, either, although both Meg and Sam squirmed at the application of Grace.  “Was that uncomfortable?” Castiel asked them both.

            “Not exactly,” Meg said, making a face.  “More… alien, I guess.  Not something I’ve ever encountered.”

            “His Grace is different from Lucifer’s,” was all Sam had to say on the subject.

            Castiel flew Dean back to Haven.  Both Meg and Sam were able to return to the city on their own, since they knew where it was, and wasn’t that a funny thing?  They’d taken all those precautions to try to make sure that Sam was where he was supposed to be and he could simply teleport at will.

            In Haven, Dean led them straight to Bobby Singer’s place and asked him to convene the Council.  Bobby grumbled, but the look on his face was sufficient to convince him that perhaps Dean was serious.

            Bobby met Meg’s eyes and smirked when she couldn’t move.  Dean had forgotten about a devil’s trap in the ceiling.  Castiel sighed and brought her a chair.  “My knight in shining armor,” she said in a dry voice.

            “Why is she out of her cell?” Bobby asked as he sent a runner named Garth out to get the rest of the council.

            “It’s not such a great story that I’m keen to tell it twice, Bobby,” Dean told him, sitting down on a low couch.

            The older warrior brought him a strong drink and some bread.  Balthazar closed his eyes for a moment; Castiel knew that he was calling for his own reinforcements.  Sam and Meg would not put out their own calls under Bobby’s roof – Meg, at least, could not.  “So,” Bobby said, by way of passing the time.  “How’s tricks?”

            “Tricky,” Meg told him, with a tiny grin.  “What’s a girl got to do to get some whiskey around here?”

            “The kind without the holy water in it, Bobby,” Dean added, as Bobby moved toward his storeroom.  “She did help out today, and kind saved Cas’ life.”

            Bobby rolled his eyes, muttering about “damned idjits, and idjits who were damned,” but came back with whiskey that gave only the right kind of burn.

            The rest of the Council appeared quickly, or at least as quickly as they could, and Balthazar quickly drew some wards onto the wall that would ensure that no one listened in.  Sam frowned, as though he was studying the glyphs, and then added a few of his own.  Balthazar blinked at Sam’s work.  “I don’t think I’ve seen those before.”

            “Lucifer likes to teach,” he said with a wry grin.  “And he likes his privacy.”

            Castiel didn’t want to think too much about that one.

            Dean quickly introduced the rest of the party.  Pamela, after all, had only heard about Sam, hadn’t even known him has a child.  She seemed to appreciate what she saw, at least from an aesthetic standpoint, which Castiel could understand.  Bobby harrumphed at the presence of yet another angel and a demon.  Everyone shifted at the presence of so many who were not Council members.  Dean explained the situation quickly, however, and gave the humans a new reason to squirm.

            “How can you be certain that this isn’t some kind of… I don’t know, illusion, cast by the demons?” Pamela asked.  Her skin had lightened by several shades during the course of Dean’s speech.  “I mean, you’re talking about a conspiracy that goes farther than anything I’ve ever imagined.”

            “It’s not an illusion, madam,” Balthazar told her.  “Meg was stuck in a devil’s trap when Virgil attacked.”  He winced as he sipped at his whiskey.

            “I’m not much of an illusionist anyway,” Meg told her.  “I don’t have the patience for it, to be honest.  I like to fight, not paint pictures.”

            Pamela blinked at her.  “That’s brutally honest.”

            Meg grinned.  “Some of us are, you know.  I’m happy to sit down with you and explain the differences between us at some point, when we get a quiet moment.  I get the feeling that while you folks in Haven know plenty about how to fight demons in general, you don’t know much about us beyond ‘salt, holy water bad, blood and violence good.’  Which are true, they’re just not the whole story.”  She gave a nasty grin.

            “Not sure if I should say yes to that or not, but it does sound intriguing,” Pamela told her.

            Meg winked.  “I won’t bite.  Unless you ask.”  She sobered up.  “Personally, I’d be perfectly happy to grab my brother and run off to Abaddon’s tribe, as far and as fast as we can.  She can certainly take on angels.  We can bring Halo Boy here and keep him safe.”  The humans and Balthazar all looked at her, but Meg just shrugged.   “What?  He’s pretty.

            “The problem, of course, is that I don’t think that the bad guys are going to leave Haven alone just because we’ve scampered off into the Wastelands.  Plus, little brother here would get feelings about that.”  She rolled her eyes and jerked her head at Sam.  “I don’t see why; Haven let him get sold to demons and now has him basically on house arrest.  But hey – I’m a demon, we don’t really do ‘nice.’”

            Missouri snorted and gave Meg a very knowing look, but said nothing about it.  Instead, she shook her head.  “I don’t think they’re likely to leave us alone either.  After all, they’ve gone to some length to make sure that Dean is here, in Haven, and alive, correct?  Dean is part of this whole scheme, we just don’t know how big.”

            “So we need to fight,” Jim sighed.  “We’ve just survived a protracted siege, I don’t know if we can make it through another one.”

            “I don’t know either.”  Bobby took off his cap.  “Especially with angels.  I mean – they’re angels.”

            “As are we.”  Castiel pointed between himself and Balthazar.  “We are not unfamiliar with our enemy.”

            “We start by warding the gates,” Sam suggested, and then he caught himself.  “I mean, _you_ start by warding the gates.  I’ll help, obviously.  The gates and the walls.  I mean, this assumes that you want to fight.”

            “Excuse me, boy?” Bobby shounted.

            “Well, we’ve been operating under the assumption that you want to fight the angels.”  Sam didn’t back down, but met Bobby’s eyes without flinching.  “The angels have been good to Haven.  Yes, they’re manipulating you.  They’ve also kept you safe from demon attacks like the one that you just survived.  I don’t want to take away from that.”  He let himself grin a little.  “It’s about free will, about choice, right?  We can’t just come in here and give you orders for the town.  We aren’t even part of the town,” he added, gesturing to himself and the other non-humans.  “It has to be your decision.  Not mine, not ours.  What Haven does, what Haven decides, needs to be a human decision.”

            Dean opened his mouth, and then he shut it again.  “Sammy’s right.  If you want to give in to the angels, that’s fine.  I’ll ask for forty-eight hours to get my men out of here, but that’s fine.  It’s a big decision.  The angels aren’t going to be happy; you might not be up for being part of whatever mess this turns into.”

            Bobby sighed.  “So.  Your vote is…”

            “Fight.  But I’m going to wind up fighting either way.  I’d rather fight where there’s a well,” Dean told him with a chuckle.

            Jim cleared his throat.  “The angels want to involve us in a fight with Lucifer?  I’m not willing to allow that.  Not at all.  They were assigned by God as our guardians, not as _that_.”  His lip curled as he spoke the word, but he recovered his pacific disposition.  “I will fight.  I’ll show that the people of Haven are better than cattle.  And I’ll stand by Sam.”

            Pamela shook her head.  “I don’t like it.  It’s great to want to stand by the Winchesters, there’s a part of me that wants to put the smug bastards in their place.  At the same time, there are _thousands_ of lives depending on us to make the decisions to keep them safe, and we can’t make those decisions based on our hearts or on idealistic ideas about what should or should not have been done for a kid in his ostensible father’s care more than a decade ago.”  She sighed.  “I mean, it sucks, but I don’t think that we should be risking everyone in Haven on the basis of sympathy for one person.  No offense.”

            Sam offered a little smile.  “None taken.”

            Missouri glared at her.  “You’re not taking offense, Sam, because up until your big sister here grew a heart there wasn’t anyone who cared about you enough to risk themselves for you.”

            “Hey!”  Dean turned around to face her.  “I got captured by Lilith’s band for him!”

            Castiel gritted his teeth together.  “Back to the task at hand, if you please.”  He poured Meg some more whiskey.  “Ms. Moseley.  Your vote, if you please.”

            She glared at Castiel.  “Fight.  Of course.”  She softened a little bit.  “I understand Pamela’s concerns.  I do.  I’m worried about the people of Haven myself.  I just don’t think that we’d escape unscathed either way.  Dean was herded here for a reason.  We still don’t know the story behind that; I don’t know if we ever will know the reasons behind that.  Everything else happened here – whatever else is going on, I think that they’re not going to be allowed to take their business elsewhere, however much they might want it to be different.”

            Bobby sighed.  “That’s kind of the way I have to look at it too.  I’d rather get the fighting away from the civilians if I can, but it doesn’t look like we’ll be the ones making that choice.  It’s going to be made for us.”

            Silence reigned in the stone chamber for a long moment.  Then Dean nodded.  “Alright.  So.  I’ll gather my men together and let them know what’s happening.  Anyone who wants to avoid fighting angels, or who doesn’t want to fight alongside Sam and Hell Chick and whatever reinforcements they can scare up, is free to take their pay and leave.  Balthazar, Cas, you two will start putting wards up on the walls and gates.  Sam, you and she can help, I guess.”

            The group dispersed.  Meg declared that she needed a small bowl and some fresh blood, which Sam volunteered to provide.  Castiel carried her out of the trap and they made their way out to the walls, with Meg ducking into an alley for privacy as she reached out to Abaddon.  Sam, for his part, studied the glyphs that Balthazar and Castiel wanted to use and suggested an older addition that could only have come from Lucifer.  “He taught you a great deal, didn’t he?” Castiel observed as Balthazar fetched the supplies they would need.

            “It was a thing he liked to do,” Sam said.  “I don’t know why.  I think he thought I’d find it useful when I finally gave in.”

            “Why didn’t you?”

            Sam graced him with the tiniest of grins.  “You really want to know?”

            “I would not have asked, Sam.”  Castiel frowned.  Humans always asked that.

            “Dean.”

            “Dean?”

            “Dean.  I won’t lie.  Sometimes I was tempted.  Sometimes I wanted to give in just to make the pain stop.  Sometimes I wanted to give in because I knew that there wasn’t anything else for me, you know?  It would be on the tip of my tongue – I’m not strong.  Not like Dean.  But then I’d think, ‘Oh, God, Dean would hate me even more.  Dean wouldn’t give in.  Dean wouldn’t want to ever see me again if I said yes.’  So I kept saying ‘no.’”  He shook his head.  “The dumbest thing, really.”

            “Your love for your brother kept your soul and your identity intact, Sam.”  Castiel straightened up and turned to look directly at the younger man.  “That is anything but dumb.”  He reached out again and put a hand on Sam’s arm.  “You should tell him.”

            Sam’s face turned red again.  “Dean wasn’t ever one for talking much.  He hasn’t asked about the whole thing.  And that’s okay.  I mean, I know I kind of repulse him now.”

            “Only because he doesn’t know you.”  Cas dropped his hand.  “Through my fault, at least in part.”

            “No, no!  Cas, no.  It’s not your fault.  You were following orders.  You didn’t know.”  Sam stepped closer, right into Castiel’s personal space, and the angel found himself looking up and into those eyes.  “You thought you were doing the right thing.”

            “But I wasn’t.”  He sighed.  “Your brother is very important to you.  And you are very important to your brother.  It would be something, to be loved as you love your brother.”

            One of Sam’s eyebrows twitched in confusion, but he said nothing about it as Balthazar and Meg both returned from their missions.

            Painting the wards on the walls of Haven took two hours.  It would have taken longer, but between the angels to fly them to the appropriate stations and Meg and Sam to dry the paint when they were finished they managed to get the work done quickly.  Castiel led the quartet out to the Hunter Legion campground after they were finished.

            A small handful of Hunters, one of whom had a large bandage around one eye, approached.  “I hear you’ve brought a heap of trouble down on us, boy,” said their apparent leader, a man Castiel knew as Gordon Walker.

            “It was not Sam who brought the trouble to you.”  Castiel stepped between Walker and Sam.  “Sam is here to help deter the threat.  Nothing more sinister than that.”

            The one with the bandaged eye spat in Meg’s general direction.  “I hear they’ve got the ear of the devil himself.”

            Balthazar rolled his eyes to heaven.  “Do you think they keep it in a jar on a shelf?  Or perhaps on a chain that they share between them, like a pendant?  They have valuable intelligence, that’s all.  And possibly some skills.”  He looked the man up and down.  “Kubrick, isn’t it?”

            Castiel examined the man’s conscience.  “You approached Meg in her cell.”

            Neither of them had heard Dean approach.  “Excuse me?”

            “Some members of Hunter Legion tried to attack Meg in her cell while Sam was still asleep,” Castiel reported.  “I believe this to be the origin of Kubrick’s eye injury.”

            “We don’t tolerate that kind of behavior in Hunter Legion.”  Dean turned to face him.  “I’ll leave it up to Meg whether we cast you outside the city walls or have you flogged and busted down to private, but we do not attack helpless prisoners that way.  Am I clear?”

            Meg smiled, a thin little smile that seemed far more genuine than her usual smirks.  “Thank you, Commander,” she said.

            “You’re welcome, Meg.  Not that you were actually helpless, I guess, but you know.  Principle and all that.”  Dean looked away.  “Anyway, most of the guys are in for the same reason we voted to fight instead of yield to the angels: they’re not going to let us go.  Doesn’t mean they’re happy about it, but they get what’s at stake.”

            “Excellent.”  Castiel nodded.  “It grows late.  If you’re comfortable here, I will escort Sam and Meg back to Jim Murphy’s home.”

            “Yeah, yeah.  Go for it.  I’m sure Sammy’s tired.”  Dean waved and gave a tired little grin.  “Good night, Sammy.”

            “Good night, Dean.”  Sam started off toward the priest’s home, with Meg and Castiel close behind.

            Jim was surprised to find that Meg could enter his home or his property; evidently he believed that the fact that his home was on sacred ground would be some protection for him.  “Oh, father,” she smiled, shaking her head.  “Maybe for most demons, younger demons and such, but I’m a lot older and nastier than that.  Isn’t that right, Samael?”

            Sam considered.  “I’ll give you old,” he said finally.  He rubbed at his face.  “I really am beat.  I’ll go close my eyes for a little bit.  Not for two days this time, okay?”  He shot Castiel a grin.  “We don’t have time for that.”

            Castiel and Meg followed him.  Sam rolled his eyes.  “Look, you two can go and find some privacy, okay?  I promise not to burn the world down or anything like that while I’m sleeping.  I know you promised Dean, but maybe Pastor Jim could sit with me or something if I need watching that badly.”

            Meg smirked.  “And what is it that you think I’m going to do with him, baby brother?  Hm?”  She raised an eyebrow.  “Maybe I’ll go hang around with the priest.”

            “Meg, you ripped the last priest you met to shreds.”

            Castiel shuddered at that.

            “I promise to be a good little demon and just talk to the man, Samael.  Maybe we can find some common ground.”  She winked at Castiel and left the room, hips swaying.

            Sam watched her go, sorrow etched on his face like some kind of permanent inscription.  “I’m sorry, Castiel.  I only meant to give you some privacy.”

            It took Castiel a moment to process what he meant by that.  “For sexual acts, you mean?”

            Sam huffed out a little laugh.  “You don’t filter your words much, do you?  The two of you aren’t exactly subtle.”

            “I suppose we aren’t.  Meg and I are extremely attracted to one another.  It is true.  I should not be so attracted to a demon, I suppose, but my understanding is that few people can control their instincts when it comes to attraction.  I could report to Heaven for adjustment, but knowing what I know now I wonder if they wouldn’t simply bury it.  If it isn’t… okay… to feel these things.”  He took a deep breath.  “Azazel, for all of his sins, made attractive children.”

            Sam choked on his own breath.  For a moment Castiel wondered if he was in danger, but he recovered.  “Cas, I’m not –“

            “It is fine if you don’t reciprocate that attraction.  You’ve been traumatized by angels, among others, and as I mentioned you can’t govern your own attractions.”  Castiel swallowed his own disappointment, grateful that his own newness to emotion made him able to hide such things.

            “That’s not it, Cas.  Not at all.”  Sam stood up and walked to the back wall of the small room, as far away from Castiel as he could get, with his hands on his arms.  “I’m just – I’m not any good, okay?  I’m not clean.  I’m a mess.”

            “You are quite fastidious, from what I can see.”  The angel tilted his head to the side.  “I fail to see the issue.”

            Sam’s bubbling laugh had more than a tinge of hysteria to it.  “No no, Cas.  I’m tainted.  I mean, you’re one of the last good angels, right?  And I’m not even a human, I’m not a demon, I’m just this thing.  I’m just a monster.  You deserve better.  Go, go find Meg.  You get along well, you’re attracted to each other, it’s a better fit.  I’m just going to get you hurt.”

            “Sam, that’s patently absurd.”  Castiel stepped forward but stopped when he saw Sam pull himself back.

            “I got my mother killed.  Dean almost got killed and turned!  Meg got captured by Haven because of me.  They sent an assassin after you because you weren’t moving fast enough to kill me!  Every friend I had when I was a kid was killed or worse.  Just – go.  Okay?”  Sam’s whole body was shaking now, and his eyes were glazed with fear.  

            Castiel didn’t want to leave him, but his presence was clearly not helping.  He did the only thing he could do.  He left the room.


	6. Let's Find A Way To Escape

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Castiel is offered revelation, and receives revelation, and it's not the same thing at all.

Castiel considered his options.  He was unversed in the ways of romance, particularly when it came to wooing two siblings at the same time, but he thought that it might be in poor taste to bring his problem to Meg right away.  Dean, on the other hand, was an experienced lover and was Castiel’s friend.  Balthazar, too, was an option, but Castiel chose to approach Dean first.  Dean was his closest friend, after all.

            He found Dean in his tent, sharpening his sword.  “What’s up, Cas?” he asked.  “Some new crisis roll up on the horizon, or were you just looking to chat?”

            Castiel considered.  “The former, I think.  But the crisis is personal in nature.”

            Dean mouthed Castiel’s words to himself as though he needed the extra help to process them.  “Okay… I didn’t realize that angels did personal crises.”

            “I did just lose my home and my flock today, Dean,” Castiel reminded his friend with a scowl.

            “I’m sorry, man.  You’re right.  I’m being kind of a dick.”  Dean checked the edge of the sword and put it down.  “What’s going on?”

            “Well, my crisis is rather more… intimate than that.”

            Dean made a face, as though he’d bitten into rancid meat.  “Oh, that is just… like, with you and Meg?”  He grabbed a flask and took a deep drink.

            “Me and Sam.”

            Dean sprayed his drink all over the floor.  “Oh my God.”

            “My Father is not involved.”

            “I think I’m going to be sick.  You and Sammy?”  Dean clutched at his stomach.  “But you and Meg – I mean you’re not exactly subtle.”

            “He said the same thing,” Castiel recalled.  “You truly are brothers.  Yes, Meg and I are very attracted to each other.  I am not averse to a relationship with her, nor do I think she is to one with me.  But it is Sam who I find more appealing, Dean.  It is Sam who I think about more often, Sam who I fantasize about.”

            Dean wrestled with his expression until he got it under control.  “So, what?  You’re just going to drop Meg?”

            Castiel sighed.  “Demons are not monogamous, nor do they expect their partners to be.  She encouraged me to talk with Sam.  I will need to discuss expectations with her, or I would.  Had I been successful with Sam.”

            “So he told you no.”  Dean shook his head.  “Well I mean if Lucifer was letting angels mess with him back in wherever, I guess I can see that.  Or maybe he’s just not into you.”

            “He said he wasn’t clean, that everyone he cares for gets hurt because of him and that he was just ‘no good.’  I am uncertain as to how to proceed.”  He sighed.  “On the one hand, he said no, and I should respect that.”

            “Damn straight you should,” Dean growled, getting into Castiel’s face.

            “On the other hand, he thinks very poorly of himself.  It is worrying, to say the least.  I need – someone needs to make him understand that what has happened in the past is not his fault and that he is worthy of affection.”  Castiel squinted at Dean.  “If this were you, if you were to find yourself in this situation, what course of action would you follow?”

            “Well for starters, I don’t think I’ve ever decided to form some kind of bizarre love triangle with half-siblings before.  For real, Cas, that’s kind of kinky.  Secondly, I had no idea you were into guys.”

            “You knew that Sam was interested in men?”  The diversion irritated Castiel, but this glimpse into Sam’s past was too fascinating to be passed up.

            “Yeah.  It bothered the shit out of our – out of Dad.  God that’s hard to get used to.”  He shook his head.  “Caught him making out with Tyson Brady out behind the temple one time.  Threw a bucket of cold water over both of ‘em, because that’s what a big brother is for.  Oh he was mad, short-sheeted my bed and everything.  He likes girls too, but you knew that already.”

            “Anyway,” Castiel said, trying to steer the conversation back.  “How can I demonstrate his value to him?”

            “Cas, you’re talking to a guy whose longest relationship was a month, okay?  And that didn’t end well at all.  I don’t know.  I mean, I know you; I’ve known you for years.  He’s known you for a couple of days and most of that has been as a jailor, right?  You have to build up to that kind of trust with a guy like Sam.  Even when he was a kid, he had to work up to stuff.  He was never into the casual hook-up thing.”  He shrugged.  “Even when it would have made his life a whole lot better.”  He drank from his flask again.  “This is the part where I tell you that if you hurt my brother I get to kill you, right?”

            “I’m more worried about him hurting himself at the moment, but I can assure you that I have no intention of harming your brother or allowing harm to come to him,” Castiel vowed.

            Dean sighed.  “I’m going to have to put some work into this.”  He grimaced.  “I kind of pushed him away – I was pissed, I took a lot of it out on him and then –“

            “And then my manipulations encouraged you.”  Castiel bowed his head.

            “Hey, you’re making it right now.”  Dean patted him on the shoulder.  “I’m going to head over to Jim’s to see if I can calm him down.  You go… preen your wings or something.”

            Balthazar’s advice was initially crass, followed by shock.  “I must say, Cassie, I didn’t think that when you got the stick out of your ass it would be for hellspawn.  Good for you, though.  They seem delightful.  I do hate to agree with the belligerent one though; you need to build up trust with Tall, Dark and Beautiful if you want the chance to climb him like the gorgeous sequoia that he is.

            “Also,” Balthazar continued, when his obvious enthusiasm at the thought of Sam in the form of a tree calmed down, “if you’re truly intent in entering into a polyamorous relationship with both siblings, talk with Meg.  She seems open to the idea and she’ll have some good insights to Sam’s character.”

            The next day was spent in preparation for battle.  Meg announced that Abaddon was on her way with reinforcements and would follow their lead so long as Crowley remained off the team.  Everyone involved was more than happy to exclude Crowley, although perhaps no one was happier about that than Sam.

            Sam asked Jim Murphy and Bobby Singer if he might be allowed access – supervised, of course – to their libraries.  Jim insisted that Sam didn’t need supervision in the library, that he was more than welcome to borrow whatever books he might want.  Bobby just told him to go to town, whatever that meant, and said nothing about the need for a chaperone.  Dean took him aside for a quiet word.

            Castiel did not approach Sam romantically again.  He did retain his post as Sam’s “chaperone,” however.  The humans, for the most part, seemed to prefer that both Sam and Meg be watched while inside Haven’s walls, and both of them admitted that they felt more comfortable with him around anyway.  “We’re not used to living inside walls,” Meg told him as Sam searched through a dusty tome at Bobby’s.  “There isn’t any breeze here, and there’s too much shade.  It’s uncomfortable to us, never mind the hostile stares from people.”

            “You think that people here are hostile to you?”  He tilted his head and squinted.  “Why?”

            She blinked her eyes into blackness.  “The tattoos mark us as from the tribes, and it’s not like we’re covering them up.  Not like we would if we could.  Even Samael – even though his are mostly involuntary, they’re part of him.  And some of them he earned.  They’re from battles he won for us, or to mark some great accomplishments.  Don’t get me wrong, it was a miserable existence, but we still let him know when he did something right.”

            Castiel nodded.  “You should both be very proud of your bodies.”

            She glanced at Sam, but Sam was absorbed in his work.  “Come walk with me.”

            The angel followed her outside, out of Sam’s hearing.  “He told me about last night,” she said, taking his hand.  “First of all, I want you to know I’m not jealous.”

            “No.  You knew I was going to speak to him in that way, and you encouraged it.”  He squeezed her hand.

            “What can I say?  I’ve got a lot of vices.  Jealousy isn’t one of them.  I think we’ve got a good thing heating up, I don’t mind if you want to have something with him too.  And he definitely thinks you’re hot stuff.”

            Castiel frowned.  “Angels tend to run cooler than humans and much cooler than demons –“

            She placed a finger on his lips.  “Hush.  The point is that I’ve seen him looking at you, and we’ve had a chance to chat.”

            He frowned.  “When?”

            She tapped his forehead.  “In here, brain trust.  He’s got some stuff to get through.  I know that he wants to, but he’s got all that gross icky human stuff that gets in the way.”  She shrugged.  “I know.  It’s a problem.  Hopefully we can work around it and if not – well, we’ll still have each other.  And he’ll still have us, just not in that way.”  She smirked.  “Sex isn’t’ the end-all, be-all of the world.  It’s great, but it isn’t everything, right?”

            “I wouldn’t know,” he told her.

            “Right.  Well, we can fix that.”  She teleported them to Balthazar’s underground villa, where he wrinkled his nose at them and directed them to a distant cave so he wouldn’t have to hear them.

***

            Sex turned out to be a revelation.  He’d understood the theory of how it was supposed to work, and no one could spend much time with Dean Winchester without understanding the basics, but he had no way of knowing just how much pleasure could be tied into such a simple mechanical act.  On the surface, to be sure, sex should have been repulsive on most levels.  For an angel, whose natural form did not involve a corporal state at all, an activity that replied on a meat body and the production and exchange of bodily fluids should have been the farthest thing from pleasant.

            On the contrary – Castiel would have gladly fucked the coming battle away, hidden in this little bower with Meg.  He loved the taste of her, the scent of her, the feel of her beneath him and on top of him and spooned up against him.  He created a washbasin for them afterward – he could have simply removed the sweat and the filth, but he wanted to take the time to wash them.  

“Thank you, Meg,” he said.  “That was wonderful.”

            “It was, wasn’t it?”  She gave him a happy, sated smile, a rare gesture from the demon.  “It’s funny, you know.  I always liked sex.  I’ve used it, too, but I’ve always enjoyed it.  I’m glad you did too.”

            “We’ve always thought of demons as creatures that were incapable of things like this – pleasure for the sake of pleasure, good and pure things.”  He kissed her.  “You’ve taught me, shown me that we were wrong.”  He chuckled.  “I suppose that you’ve taught me that I was wrong about a lot of things.”

            “Maybe a few.”  She shrugged.  “Sam’s probably ultimately responsible though.  I mean, I would never have come over to this side if it weren’t for him.”  She squeezed him around his waist.

            “He’s an impressive young man.”

            “He was supposed to be our savior.  In a way, I guess he’s saved me.”  She made a face.  “Ugh.  I feel almost clean.”

            Castiel laughed.  “I won’t tell him you said that.”

            They made their way back to Jim Murphy’s house, where they found Dean fast asleep in Sam’s room.  Dean had managed to get Sam under the covers, which was more than Castiel had managed to do, and had fallen asleep on top of them.  It looked uncomfortable; both men were generously sized, and the bed was a small one, but the priest simply smiled when he came upon the couple in the doorway.  “They used to sleep like this all the time,” he whispered, leading them away.  “Sammy used to get nightmares all of the time, so he’d fight sleep.  Only Dean could get him sorted out; John hated that.”  His face darkened, but he recovered quickly.  “I was just heading off to bed myself.  I’ll see you in the morning?”

            The next day started out much the same as the first.  Abaddon’s tribe would take several days to arrive.  They had magic on their side to help them get to the city quickly, but they were still too numerous to simply teleport in.  A pale, red-haired young woman did show up at the gates, smiling quietly and demanding entrance.

            Castiel recognized her immediately.  “Let her in,” he ordered the Hunters manning the gates.  “That’s Anael.  She used to be my superior.”

            The wards had to be altered, which Castiel did quickly, to allow Anael to pass through the magical barrier that kept angels out.  He probably should have consulted the other conspirators or at least the Council before admitting an angel, but this was Anael.  Anael, who had taught him everything he knew.  Anael, who had disappeared one day without a word.  “Zachariah told us you were dead!” he said, embracing her and calling out for Balthazar with his Grace.

            “You already know why I left, Castiel,” she said with a sad smile.  “The same reasons as Balthazar, ultimately.  He’s the one who called me here, by the way.  I heard you could use an extra set of wings.”   Her smile deepened and broadened.  “So here I am!”

            Balthazar arrived with the other conspirators, Dean already sliding into a more predatory mode as soon as he laid eyes on Anael.  Castiel made the introductions, noting with surprise that Anael and Meg seemed to get along with no problems at all.  She inspected their wards and noted with some surprise the additions that Sam had made.  Sam explained the process behind them to her, and her eyes lit up as she put a proprietary hand on his arm and insisted that they had a great deal to discuss.

            Castiel felt a pang as he watched them go.  He tried to tell himself that it wasn’t jealousy.  

            “Don’t sweat it,” Dean advised him.  “They’re just going off to get their geek on.  I don’t know what it’s been like for the past few years, but Sammy didn’t get the chance very often when he lived with us.”

            Meg shook her head.  “Not like that,” she admitted.  “It was different.”

            Balthazar and Castiel exchanged glances.  At least they were trying.

            Later, Anael pronounced herself impressed with Sam’s degree of knowledge.  “He told me that he’s been ‘encouraged’ to study this type of magic, among other things, since he was given to Azazel.  His knowledge would make him dangerous if he weren’t so attached.”  She gave a quick little grin.  “I can see what Lucifer intended to do with him, and why Zachariah and company wanted him destroyed if he wasn’t under Lucifer’s control.”

            That night, Uriel appeared at the gates, tall and dark and majestic.  Hunters, guards and townsmen lined the walls, staring at this newcomer whose presence seemed to dwarf the city.  “My name is Uriel,” he declared, and he did not shout but his voice carried to every house in Haven.  “I am a specialist.  Ask the traitor, Castiel, what kind of specialist I am.”

            Thousands of eyes - on the walls, on the ground behind the walls -  turned to Castiel.  Sam and Meg glanced once at Uriel and then nodded.  So Uriel was part of the conspiracy too.  The angel’s stomach turned.  Uriel had been one of his subordinates.  He’d answered directly to Castiel, but apparently he’d had another master.  “Uriel destroys cities,” Castiel acknowledged, allowing his voice to carry.  He didn’t bother with the broadcasting, though; that was in poor taste.  “The Wastelands were once verdant pastures and cool forests, punctuated by vibrant cities and towns.  They are as they are now thanks to Uriel’s efforts.”

            A murmur ran through the crowd.  Uriel waited for a moment, and then raised one hand.  The humans fell silent.  “You have one day to expel the stain that is known as Samael, or Sam Winchester, from your walls, and you will be allowed to live as you have for thousands of years.”

            Castiel rolled his eyes.  “I never realized you were such a showboat, brother.  Are these techniques you have learned from your newest mentor, Lucifer?”

            A great collective gasp went up from the crowd.  Uriel allowed his jaw to fall open, as though he was astonished somehow.  “You would dare accuse me of fraternizing with the Morningstar!”

            “Not us,” Balthazar drawled.  Meg and Sam popped up beside him and Castiel.  “They’re the ones who were there.”

            The enemy dropped the pretense.  “Well?  And what of it?  Our orders come from God!”

            “No,” Anael pointed out, shaking her head slightly.  “They don’t.  And you know it.  Our Father hasn’t issued an order directly since He told us to love serve and protect His newest creatures, a task at which you’ve always been exceptionally bad.  Sam Winchester stays where he is.”

            Uriel sneered.  “I’ll return in twenty-four hours and see if you feel the same way.”

            “Sam, can you kill him or something?” Dean asked, eyes narrowed.

            “Sam, not yet,” Castiel interrupted, putting a hand on Sam’s bare arm.  “Killing him now might spark a hefty retaliation, and reinforcements haven’t arrived yet.  We can’t handle the entire weight of the Host yet.”   _If at all_ , he added, but silently.

            Uriel flew away.

            Sam, too, disappeared, teleporting away rather than try to fight his way through the staring crowd.  Castiel didn’t think that they were likely to be hostile but he also didn’t think that he was the best judge of that sort of thing, all things considered.  He soon learned that he ought to leave people reading to humans when someone threw a piece of fruit at Meg.  “Demon!” shouted someone in a patched tunic.

            “This is your fault!” yelled a woman with a baby in her arms.

            “I’m out like last year’s crops,” Meg told them.  “I’ll be in your cave, Fashion Victim.”

            “No worries,” Balthazar assented with a wave, and Meg disappeared.

            “Damn it, Sam,” Dean sighed, as the crowd dissolved into angry muttering.  “Listen up, people!” he bellowed.

            People stopped where they were.  They didn’t come back, but they stopped trying to leave.

            Castiel boosted Dean’s voice with his Grace and Dean continued.  “Now, I don’t know about you, but it’s not sounding to me like Sammy’s the bad guy here.”  People muttered, so Castiel increased his friend’s volume.  “We’ve got an angel who admits that the very existence of the Wastelands is down to him.  He wants to give Sammy, who Missouri Mosley and Pamela Barnes will both tell you is a very powerful psychic, over to friggin’ _Lucifer_.  And he’s been seen hanging around Lucifer’s campfire!  He didn’t bother to try denying that, did he?”

            A few people shook their heads, looking at their shoes.

            “So I’m not seeing where Sammy’s at fault for any of this,” he continued.  “Yeah, he was with the demons, but only because John Winchester sold him there.  He’s a good kid trying to find his footing in the world, okay?  And Meg – well, she’s showing us that even a demon can try to do the right thing, sometimes.”  He made a face.  “I need a drink after saying that.  But she’s with us, and she’s trying to fight the bad guys same as we are.  She’s not the one that wants to tear down this city; Uriel is.  She’s not the one that wants to hand a powerful weapon over to the Prince of Freaking Darkness; the angels are.  And they want to use you, and you, and you and you and you, to do it.”

            Angry shouting of a different type came back.  “No!” yelled a man in a plaid tunic.

            “Are you going to let them turn you into tools in their hands?” Dean roared?

            “No!” the crowd cried back, one unified voice.

            “Are you going to let them tell you who can stay in Haven and who can’t?”

            “No!”

            “Are you going to let them tell you what the rules are?”

            “No!”

            Dean grinned, a slow and sexy expression that had won him many partners.  “Are you going to stand up for yourselves, and use your free will?”

            “Yes!” they chanted.  “Yes!  Yes!  Yes!”

            “Alright!  For now, go back to your homes,” Dean counseled.  “Enjoy your night.  Tell your husbands and your wives and children that you love them.  These rogue angels, we don’t know how many there are or how high up this conspiracy goes.  But it’s going to be a fight.  Not a fight for Sammy or for the Winchesters or anything like that, but a fight for humanity.  A fight for free will.  A fight for you and me.  I’ll see you all tomorrow.”

            People returned to their homes in a much better mood.  Castiel turned to Dean.  “Where do you think Sam would have gone?”

            He raised his arms out to his sides.  “Your guess is as good as mine, buddy.  I guess start with Jim Murphy’s place and go from there?”

            They did start with the priest’s residence.  Sam was not there, although there were signs that he’d been there recently.  Castiel flew them to the cave, but he wasn’t there either.  Meg frowned.  “I can’t think of any place here that he’d be keen to visit again,” she confessed.  “Not outside the city.  I didn’t have a chance to poke around too much inside his memories when I was possessing him because I was fighting too hard just to stay in control.  Was there anyplace in town that held any special significance when he was young?  Any place he liked to hide out when he used to run off?”

            Dean sighed and ran his hands through his hair, tugging on it.  “I don’t know.  He never ran off to the same place twice; that would have made it too easy, right?”  He shook his head.  “Um.  We need someplace secluded because he doesn’t know that the townspeople aren’t trying to kill him anymore.”

            Castiel considered.  “Where could he go to bathe?”

            Dean stared at him.  “You think he went to go have a wash?  What, you think he had an attack of the vapors too?”

            The angel shook his head.  “No.  He is plagued, as I mentioned, by ideas of being unclean.  It presses on his mind like a weight.  Is there a secluded place where he might go to try to wash himself?”

            Dean considered.  “There used to be a bath house over near the river,” he remembered.  “A new one was built in the ‘new quarter’ about fifty years ago and the old one was abandoned.  It’s not exactly structurally sound, but I suppose it’s someplace he would know about.”

            “Take me there, Dean.”

            “Yeah, sure thing, Cas.”  Dean led Castiel out into the streets, through winding and twisting roads into the oldest part of Haven.  This was the part of the city where you could see the kernel of the village that had once been, back when humans had barely started to build structures out of anything with more substance than skins and thought that sticking around in one place for a season or two might be a good idea.  The streets here were barely wide enough for a single cart, and pushed right up to the edge of the river’s flood path.

            The ruins of the old bathhouse lurked on the edge of this ancient part of the city.  Castiel couldn’t understand why no one had bothered to re-use the site, but some of the structure still stood gloomily over the old boilers and pumps that allowed the old facility to operate.

            Castiel created a torch for Dean, and the pair edged inside.  The first two rooms were empty, or at least were void of oversized half-demons with soft hair and hazel eyes.  The pair found evidence of animal infestations, and of some prior human habitation, but no Sam.  Castiel paused.  The place had been large when it had been in use; roof collapses had only created more places to hide.  Sam could not be found by angels, even Castiel, but there had to be another way.  He extended his senses.

            “Water,” Castiel identified.  “Running water, this way.”  He took off down a long hallway.

            Dean made a face.  “Water.  Of course.  You couldn’t have been a divine dowsing rod when that village had that drought two years back?”   He followed along anyway, feet moving silently across the smashed tiles.

            They found him in a windowless room near the back of the facility.  It would have been a nice room, once upon a time.  The walls had been tiled with elaborate mosaics, geometric images that evoked nothing but admiration for the precision of their layout.  The bath itself had been a work of genius, providing continuously running water to prevent accumulation of grime.  No water had run in the place for many decades, but Sam had gotten the ancient apparatus running again and apparently used the magic left to him by Azazel to heat the water to an almost scalding level.  Castiel could feel the heat radiating off the bath in waves.

            “You shouldn’t be here.”  Sam’s voice came from behind gritted teeth.

            Dean held up his torch and hissed at what he saw.  Sam’s tender flesh was red.  The water had colored it in the places where his scrubbing had not done so.  “Sammy,” he said, and sat down on the ground beside the tub.  “Sammy.”  His voice was more of a low, mournful groan than any kind of word; Castiel understood his intention more from his years of familiarity than from any other cause.

            “I’m fine, Dean.”  Sam clearly understood his brother too.

            “You are not fine.”  Castiel reached out and lifted the larger man out of the tub.  “If you break the tattoos you risk losing their effectiveness.”

            “So what?”  Sam didn’t fight as the angel lifted him out of the tub, but hung his head in such a way that his hair hung into his face like a curtain.  “I’m going out there tomorrow.”

            Castiel grabbed one of Sam’s arms even as Dean grabbed the other.  “The hell you are!” the brother snarled.  “You’re going to stay right here inside these city walls and you’re going to help us fight those sons of bitches.”

            “Dean, if we just give them what they want they’ve got no reason to come for you,” Sam insisted, grabbing onto his brother’s sleeves.  “I can’t risk you getting hurt because I got scared.  We’ll just let them take me out – we’ll make them take me out – before they can hand me over.  It’s okay.”

            Castiel shook him a little.  “It is not okay,” he growled into Sam’s ear.  “There is no part of this that is okay.  Nothing is worth losing you, Sam.  Nothing.”

            “We’re talking about thousands of people, Castiel!” Sam yelled.  “Thousands!  Not just people, either!  We’re talking about Meg, we’re talking about you!  We’re talking about _Dean!_ ”

            “I don’t care!” he shouted back.  “Sam, they’re not going to go away once they have you!  They’re going to go to war with Lucifer for no reason other than to get my Father’s attention.  That will result in Haven’s being wiped from the map anyway.  I can’t stop them alone.  I need you with me.  With us.”

            Dean had grabbed Sam’s clothing and the rough towel his brother had brought from the priest’s residence.  He dried his brother off with as much tenderness as he could, not that Sam seemed to feel what must have been painful touches given the state of his skin, and wrapped his leather kilt around his narrow hips.  “Come on, Sammy,” he urged.  “People are worried about you back at Jim’s.  Or are you worried about the people?”

            “Your brother has quite the gift for oratory,” Castiel told Sam.  He reached out and brushed a wet hair away from Sam’s cheek, expending a small amount of Grace to heal his burns and abrasions.  “It seems that the town is suddenly very receptive to the presence of you and Meg in their midst.”

            Sam looked doubtful, and Dean immediately switched tack.  “Or we can go to Balthazar’s cave.  Would you like that, Sammy?  He likes you, and it’s safer than anyplace right now.”  Sam nodded, and Dean met Castiel’s eyes.  The angel didn’t need words to understand what was intended.  He wrapped an arm around Sam’s waist, touched two fingers to Dean’s forehead, and flew them all to Balthazar’s cave.


	7. Don't Try To Fight It, Don't Tell Me You Can't See

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trick(ster)s and Treats

            Castiel refused to leave Sam alone that night, not because he believed he was untrustworthy, but because he feared for his mental state.  He gave Dean and Meg the option of staying with the young man themselves if they didn’t trust Castiel with his virtue, but he absolutely did not feel confident in Sam’s stability right now.

            This, of course, prompted Balthazar to press his hands to his chest in mock affront.  “Are you suggesting that you don’t trust me with his virtue, Cassie?”

            “Absolutely.”  Castiel kept a straight face when he replied.  “Plus, you’ll try to make him wear tights, and I don’t think he can handle that right now.”

            Sam made a face.  “Right here, guys.  And my mental state absolutely cannot handle tights.”

            “Those of us who appreciate a finely shaped set of legs can’t handle you in tights,” Balthazar shot back with a wink, and Castiel felt better.  “I mean really, Sam.  The kilt is bad enough, and all we can see is those magnificent calves.”

            Dean pulled his head back.  “Okay you do realize that I changed his diapers, right?”

            Meg stuck her tongue out at him.  “You were what, five?”

            “So?  He still needed his diapers changed.”  The warrior squirmed.  “So.  We need to find some kind of weapons for Sam and Meg.”

            “I should have had a knife when I was taken,” Meg suggested.  “It won’t take an angel down, but it’ll work on most other things.”

            Sam shrugged.  “Any kind of knife or blade will work for me.”  He took a deep breath.  “You sure you’re okay with that?”

            “No,” Dean admitted.  “The heart isn’t a machine, Sammy.  It’s not like you just… stop feeling a way about things.  I know, in my head, that nothing was your fault.  When I start to get mad and want to lash out, I have to remind myself that it was wrong, now that I do know.  But it’s going to take it a while, you know?  I have to learn to stop reacting that way.  I mean, it wasn’t just Cas, you know?  Dad…”  He swallowed.  “Dad encouraged me, you know?  He didn’t want me thinking of you well.”

            Sam looked away.  “I know.”

            “So I am trying, Sammy,” Dean said, putting a hand on his shoulder.  “I’m going to give you weapons, and I’m going to try really hard not to check in on you every twenty seconds.  It’s not going to be easy to unlearn all that distrust.  But I’m going to try, and part of that is doing things like it’s already happened and working through it.”  He smiled.  “You are my brother.  And I know you want this to work.  I do too.  We’ll get there.”  He hugged Sam, and Sam was so astonished that for a moment he forgot to hug back.

            Then he did, and the whole room breathed a collective sigh of relief.  Finally, though, Castiel decided to lead Sam off to bed.  He’d had a long and trying day; he needed his rest.

            Balthazar directed them to yet another luxuriously appointed cavern chamber, this one decorated with darker colors than the first but still richly appointed.  “I’m sorry I made everyone worry,” Sam murmured as he sat on the edge of the bed.  “You don’t have to sit here and watch me while I sleep.  I’ve been good; I haven’t tried to sneak off or anything so far, right?”  He gave Cas a winsome smile, showing dimples and even teeth.

            Castiel reached out and stroked the inside of Sam’s wrist, just below his elbow.  It was one of the places where he’d scrubbed himself raw, not that anyone could tell after Castiel had healed him, but the angel didn’t think he’d ever forget the image of the desperation conveyed by that simple act.  “Sam,” he said, watching the flesh underneath pebble into goosebumps.  “I wasn’t lying before.  It’s not an issue of trust; it’s an issue of wanting to make sure that you’re comfortable and well.  Everyone here tonight cares for you very deeply, Sam.”

            “You don’t even know me,” Sam murmured, looking away.  He didn’t withdraw his hand, though, so Castiel felt emboldened.

            He dropped his head and kissed the space he’d just touched.  “So let me know you, Sam,” he said, in a soft tone.

            Sam closed his eyes and breathed deeply.  That simple kiss was having an obvious effect on him, that much Castiel could see.  “You won’t want to know me once you do.”  A light flush spread across Sam’s cheeks and he held his body perfectly still.  The urge to bolt thrummed through his muscles, a palpable thing, but he was fighting it.  He _needed_ to run, but he _wanted_ to stay.

            “You don’t know that.  I know that you love your sister and your brother.  I know that you would rather endure the worst suffering possible than let the people of Haven face the wrath of the angels.  I know that you’ve found ways to use what you’ve learned through everything you’ve endured to the advantage of others.  What I’ve seen, I like very much.”  He kissed Sam’s arm again, and added a soft nip for emphasis.  “Perhaps I might be allowed to make up my own mind on the rest as well.”

            Sam swallowed, hard.  “What about Meg?”

            “Meg knows, Sam.  I have a relationship with her, and I would like a relationship with you.  She is encouraging of our relationship.”  He hesitated.  “Are you at peace with the idea?”

            Sam nodded, just a little bit.  “It’s not – it’s not what they would do here.  But I don’t see why you should have to choose.”

            “May I kiss you?”

            Sam flinched, but bent down and touched his lips to Castiel’s.

            Sam kissed differently than Meg did.  His kiss was tender, and perhaps a bit hesitant at first, but Castiel supposed that he’d had little enough tenderness in his life since leaving his father’s house.  Once he had convinced himself that this was real, however, he brought his hands up to cradle Castiel’s face and take deeper control of the kiss.

            Meg kissed like a wicked creature, calling his passions to the surface.  Sam, though – he kissed like his very life depended on it, or maybe like Castiel’s did, and if Castiel had a soul to lose he thought Sam might be able to draw it right out of him through his lips alone.

            Castiel couldn’t hold back a moan, and he didn’t much want to.  He let his hands roam over Sam’s solid pectoral muscles, finding the hard little nubs of his nipples.  “Sam,” he whispered, helping him off with his tunic and letting Sam take his off.  “Holy Father, you’re beautiful.”

            Sam’s face turned bright red.  “Castiel,” he said, voice a low, tiger-like growl in the angel’s ear.  He sat down on the bed and pulled Castiel down beside him, nibbling from his ear down his neck and finally down to his collarbone.  Sam’s teeth were perfect, absolutely perfect, and the gentle little bites made him lose himself in sensation as Sam explored his body with his hands and his tongue.  He found Castiel’s nipples and lavished attention on them, something he wouldn’t have thought he’d like until it happened, and what had started out as desire became a pressing need.

            Castiel had never been this hard in his life.  Part of what was causing that feeling was the fact that one of Sam’s large hands had found his cock and was giving it a few experimental, light-as-a-feather strokes on the outside of his trousers.  “Sam!” he gasped.  “I think you should stop that!”

            Sam pulled away as though he’d been burned.  “I’m so sorry,” he said, face exemplifying shame.  “I shouldn’t have –“

            “Sam.”  Castiel put a finger on Sam’s lips.  Sam bit his lips, eyes shut.  “Look at me, Sam.”

            Sam’s eyes flew open.

            “I only meant that you should stop because I didn’t want to finish so quickly,” he told his lover.  “Please.  Let me see you.”

            Sam took a deep breath and gave him a sheepish little grin.  Then he got up off the bed and took off his kilt.   He walked over to the nightstand and looked inside the single drawer, smiling when he found a stone jar.  “Balthazar is the best host,” he said with a satisfied smirk, and turned to Castiel.  “Okay.  Honesty time.  Have you ever had sex with a male before?”

            Castiel shook his head.  “Never.”

            “Alright.  It’s probably easiest for you to top, then.  I think – I think I know what will be good for you.  Do you trust me?”

            The angel looked at Sam’s large erection, bobbing red and proud against his abdomen.  “I trust you,” he said, meeting those kaleidoscopic eyes without flinching.

            “Alright.  Lie here on your back,” Sam directed, helping Castiel off with his trousers.  He licked his lips when he saw Castiel’s unclad cock, eyes glued to it.  “This is going to be….”  He closed his eyes and smiled, slow and easy and clearly very much at peace, for the moment at least.  “Can I taste you, Castiel?”

            Castiel nodded.  This was something that he and Meg had done; he knew what to expect to some extent.  Sam scooted down over Castiel’s lower body and hovered over his erection for a moment, breath hot and damp over his delicate skin and thick, wiry hair.  Then Sam looked up and made eye contact with Castiel and took the head of his cock into his mouth.

            Just the tip, just the slightest hint of the heat that lay beyond the portal of Sam’s lips, was enough to make Castiel cry out.  Sam’s eyes danced merrily as he brought his tongue into the process, swirling it around the head and teasing the slit.  Castiel’s hands flailed reflexively, looking for something to grab in case his body floated away on the bliss from Sam’s ministrations.  After a moment or two, though, Sam’s mouth couldn’t be satisfied with so little and he lowered his mouth to take in more of Castiel.

            “Are you trying to kill me, Sam?” the angel gasped as Sam laid an arm across his hips to keep them from bucking up.  “I’m not going to be able to last if you keep doing that.”

            Sam pulled off with a pop and a truly wicked grin.  “We can’t have that, now, can we?”  He climbed up on top of Castiel, straddling him, and reached for the stone jar.  “Do you know how to open me up, Castiel?”

            Cas shook his head.  He knew that it must be done, of course, but his experience with Meg had not included this particular type of penetration.

            Sam leaned down and kissed him.  “That’s okay.  I’m going to show you how, walk you through it.”  He slicked up two of his own fingers and two of Castiel’s, and positioned himself over Castiel in such a way that the angel could easily reach him again.

            Sam from this angle could certainly be interpreted as intimidating, by someone who saw himself as weak.  His body was long – long torso, long limbs, and it was all lean muscle and ink.  He reached around himself now and found a place that Castiel couldn’t quite see, given the angle, but it must have been a good place because he gave a little sigh and his face relaxed into a smile.  “Alright, Cas.  Take one of your fingers and follow mine.”

            Castiel didn’t hesitate to obey.  Sam’s sigh of pleasure turned into a little moan.  “Yes, that’s nice.  Just like that,” Sam praised.  “That’s great, Cas.”

            Sam’s body felt impossibly tight – he couldn’t possibly expect to fit something the size of Castiel’s cock into such a little space, not when he could barely get two fingers in here?  Some of Castiel’s doubts must have shown on his face, because Sam gave a breathy little chuckle.  “Don’t worry, we’re going to stretch it.  It’s going to be fine.”

            After a second or two, Sam’s body relaxed around the intrusion, and Sam instructed him to move his finger around a little bit.  The angel felt a little silly but Sam made some sounds that changed his mind about that very quickly.  He moaned, he sighed, he gasped, and he even shouted once or twice when a particularly good spot was brushed against.  After a moment, Sam added another finger.  Castiel felt his lover’s body resist the intrusion for a second before it relaxed, and he waited for Sam’s cue before adding his own second finger.

            Sam’s pupils had dilated further that Castiel had seen before, almost demon-black, by the time he nodded.  “Okay.  Fun as this has been, I’m going to need to have you in me now.  If that’s still okay with you.”

            Castiel, who had been utterly absorbed in watching Sam enjoy the opening process, suddenly remembered that he had a very strong need that Sam had deliberately exacerbated.  “That would be a good idea.”

            Sam reached for the stone jar again, using the salve inside to slick Castiel’s cock up before lining it up with his own stretched hole.  He met Castiel’s eyes, grinned, and slowly sank down, sheathing Cas within himself.

            “Oh!”  Cas had no other words, either in Enochian or in the human tongue, to describe the feeling when Sam’s body engulfed him.  He’d known that it would be tight.  He’d known that it would be hot.   He’d gleaned that from the way that he’d opened his partner up.  This, though – this was something completely different.  In a way it seemed crushing, consuming, and in a way it seemed like he wanted to be consumed because nothing could ever be as good as this.

            Sam held himself still for a moment.  A fine sweat had broken out over his body and he closed his eyes, breathing deeply.  Then he opened them again and started to move.

            Sam was impaling himself on Castiel, over and over, and if his cries were anything to go by he was loving every second of it.  For Castiel’s part, he understood now why angels were willing to Fall over the issue of sex.  The entire world had narrowed until nothing was left but him and Sam, and the rhythm between them.  It took Castiel a moment to pick it up, but he wasn’t going to leave Sam to do all of the work by himself.  His hips soon began to meet Sam’s in time with the pace that the younger man set, and that just put even more passion into Sam’s frenzied cries.

            Castiel didn’t last as long as he might have liked, spilling into Sam as though his Grace were being ripped out of him.  Who knew; perhaps it was?  He reached up a hand while he still had the presence of mind to do so and touched Sam’s hard, angry-red cock, and it was enough to send him over the edge as well.

            Once both men had worked through their orgasms, leaving the bed a sticky, sweaty mess, Sam carefully dismounted from Castiel.  He went to find his kilt, but Castiel stopped him.  “Sam, you were supposed to be resting.  What do you need?  I will get it for you.”

            Sam ducked his head, blushing.  “I was going to get a cloth and some water to clean us up.”

            Castiel kissed him and used his Grace to clean them and the bed.  “You need your sleep, Sam.  And I will lie with you, and watch over you.”

            Sam hesitated, but his smile didn’t falter.  On the contrary, it got wider.  “Alright.  I can do that.”  He climbed under the covers, and rested his head on Castiel’s chest.  “Thanks for that, Cas.  That was pretty amazing.”

            “It was revelatory.”  Castiel put an arm around Sam, holding him closer.  “Thank you for that.”  He paused, wanting to ask but not wanting to push him into exhaustion.  He would ask for more tomorrow or the next time the spirit so moved them both.

            The next day they emerged from their room.  Meg hugged them both, and they enjoyed the moment as a group, but otherwise no one said anything about the night before.  Instead, they all headed back into town and got to work preparing for the onslaught.  A few people looked at Sam with speculation, but no one approached him with hostility and a few asked for advice on anti-possession warding.

            By mid-afternoon, a new figure appeared at the gates.  He gave his name as Loki and said that “Yellow-eyes’ kids sent for me.”  That he crossed over the barrier meant that he was neither demon nor angel, although Castiel didn’t think that Sam or Meg would have called for a human or known a human to call.  He was short, and had the look of a vagabond to him.

            Meg greeted him with a wicked smile.  “Loki!  How’s tricks?”

            “Always the same.”  He hugged her and kissed her cheek.  “And you, Samael?”

            Sam seemed much less enthusiastic about the new arrival.  Perhaps it was simply the result of exposure to humans, but Loki seemed likewise unenthusiastic about Sam.  “I’m surprised that you actually showed up,” Sam huffed, arms crossed across his chest.  “Come to gawk?”

            Loki rolled amber eyes.  “Nice.  No.  You people have put your foot in it but good this time, and I’ve come to try to keep you from tearing down the world.”

            Meg pressed her lips together.  “Loki is a god.  A pagan god.”

            “A god of trickery,” Loki reminded them, waggling his eyebrows up and down.

            “And I thought we could use all of the help we could get.  Which we can.”  Meg glared at Sam.  “We can’t afford to lose his help, Samael.”

            Sam’s nostrils flared.  “Which side is he going to help, I wonder?”

            “Oh, Sam.  You wound me!”  Loki pressed his hands to his chest and fluttered his eyelashes.

            “It can be arranged.”

            Castiel flinched at the tone to Sam’s voice.  “Sam,” he said, putting a hand on his lover’s arm.  Every muscle under all that tanned and inked skin was hard as a rock.  “Who is this man?”

            “Sam and I have tangled a time or two,” Loki said, turning to face the rest.  “I might or might not have dropped him into a time loop.”

            “I might or might not have been the only one you dropped into that loop,” Sam snarled.

            Loki held his hands up.  “Okay.  Fine.  I might have killed your brother a hundred and fifty times in that time loop.  But it’s not like they stuck!”

            Dean looked at Castiel.  “Why don’t I remember dying a hundred and fifty times?”

            “Part of the deal, Dean-o.”  Loki shrugged.  “I took you back to the beginning of the loop and let you out of it, he let me go.  You should probably be proud of him or something,” he added in an offhand tone.  “He did manage to defeat my time loop and find a way out of it.  No one had done that before.”  He sneered.  “Of course, I returned you to the past, and to your father.  I returned _him_ to his present, and to _his_ father.  None of that matters right now.  You need me for what you’re going to be facing.”

            Dean looked doubtful.  “You can fight angels?”

            Loki huffed onto his fingernails and polished them on his shabby tunic.  “I’ve tangled with them a time or two, and I’m still here.  Sister Stiletto there wouldn’t have called me if I weren’t going to be of some use, right?”

            Balthazar wrinkled his nose.  “I hate to say it, but he’s right.  We do need all of the help we can get.  What are the odds that you can get other pagan gods on our side?”

            “Limited,” Loki admitted as Sam’s face shut down.  “They’re not fans of the angels or the demons, but there’s only so much that they can do against him.”

            Dean scoffed.  “But you’re different, right?”

            Loki smirked.  “I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve.”  He met Castiel’s eyes.  “Starting with a good-sized stash of holy oil.”

            All three angels present gave a collective gasp.  “Where did you get your hands on that?” Balthazar asked, stepping forward.  “More to the point, why do you even know about that?  That’s not something we brag about.”

            The god chuckled.  “Don’t I know it.”  He brushed his hand against the wall, and Castiel felt a subtle shift.

            “What did you just do?” Anael asked, eyes narrowed.  “To the barrier?  What did you do?”

            Sam stepped forward and grabbed Loki’s arm, giving the much-smaller man a little shake.  “He altered the wards.”  Sam’s eyes went yellow for a moment as he scanned the magical barrier.  “He altered them for an archangel.  To allow one archangel to pass through.”  Sam’s eyes stayed in demonic mode as he held onto the creature in his grasp with more than just his hands.

            “Whoa.  Hey, there, Samarino, there’s no reason to put the hurt on there.  I’m not flying off.  Not this time.  This whole thing is too big.”  He gestured widely, encompassing Haven and the sky above them.  “You’ve gotten a hell of a lot stronger since the last time I saw you, kiddo.”

            “I had incentive,” Sam growled.

            Castiel put a hand on Sam’s bicep.  “You can always grab him again if he tries anything, Sam.”

            “Who are you?” Anael snapped.  “Why are you here?”

            “I really am Loki.  I really am a trickster god.”  Sam’s eyes returned to their usual hazel color as he stepped back, allowing Castiel to guide him, but he didn’t look anywhere but at his enemy.  “I just happen to also be an archangel.  Used to go by the name of Gabriel.”

            Castiel staggered, and now it was Sam’s turn to play the supportive role.  “We were told that Lucifer killed you!”

            “I’m sure he’d like to.  He would if he knew where I was right now.”  Gabriel shrugged.  “I wasn’t a big fan of the decision to expel him, but whatever.  I was also not a big fan of what Heaven turned into after Dad left.  Neither, for the record, was Dad.  I think he regretted what he’d done.”  He sighed.  “Lucifer was rebellious, and he was jealous.  Dad gave him the boot for his insubordination and Lucifer turned into – well, what he turned into.  Mikey turned into someone who thought he was God, and those sniveling shits just lined up behind him rather than thinking for themselves.  So Dad just took off.  Couldn’t face what he’d done, and I sure wasn’t sticking around to live in Mikey’s play land.

            “So I altered my Grace, just enough that they couldn’t find me, and I came to live among the pagans.  Kept off the radar, kept my head down.  Altering my Grace meant that the wards you put up didn’t keep me out, but they hurt just enough to be annoying.  So I fixed it.  That’s all.  They’ll still keep out the rest of the flock.”

            “You abandoned us.”  Castiel shook his head as Sam stroked his back.  “You walked away!”

            “I did.”  Gabriel sighed.  “I can’t… Look.  I didn’t see another solution.  I’m still not sure that there was one at the time.  But this whole mess?  It’s not going to bring our Father home.  It’s just going to result in a lot of pain and misery.  I wasn’t thrilled with Dad’s new creations myself, but I’ve come to love them too.  He gave us a job; it’s time for us to do it.  And to help them defend themselves.”

            Dean made a face.  “Killed me a hundred and fifty times?”

            “And look, not a scratch on you!”  Gabriel patted him on the chest and tried to walk away, but Sam growled at him in just such a way that even Castiel felt nervous.   “Got it, big guy.  Hands off Big Bro.  Pretty sure there’s going to be a bit of a fight here; we can hash out our personal differences later if you still feel the need.”

            Sam’s lip curled but he stepped back, and Gabriel flew away to parts unknown.  He returned moments later with a giant amphora that, Castiel had to assume, contained one of the few substances that could harm an angel: holy oil.

            Balthazar scratched the back of his own head.  “I might have, er, acquired some small items from Heaven’s armory.”  He lounged against a wall.  “They weren’t going to do anyone any good up there anyway; I mean everyone up there already has something that can kill an angel, am I right?”

            Castiel ran a hand over his face.  “Am I to understand that you’ve stolen the weaponry of Heaven?”

            “Maybe?”

            Anael gave a pragmatic shrug.  “The weapons will prove useful, Castiel.  How they came into our possession is of less import.   Balthazar, can you please retrieve the weapons?”

            Balthazar obeyed, and they surveyed what they had.  Some of the devices were not meant for use on angels, but some could be easily used on the human-like vessels that the angels had created for themselves.  The Jewel of Lot, for example, would not kill an angel but it would destroy that vessel, causing them to return to Heaven to create another vessel from scratch, taking him out of the fight for a matter of weeks if not years.  There was a bow with arrows tipped with angel blade heads, and Castiel wondered who precisely had decided that was a good idea, but it would come in handy now.  Dean took that one.  Meg needed no weapon; she had her knife and she had her hellhounds.

            Castiel shivered.  Hellhounds could harm an angel.

            Some Hunters accepted heavenly weapons.  Most of them were non-lethal, but Castiel didn’t mind that.  He didn’t want to slaughter the Host; he wasn’t Lucifer, after all.  He wanted to free them and to not die.  To not have their friends die.  To remind them of their Father’s true orders.

            “Abaddon and her tribe are nearby,” Meg told him as they suited up.  Gabriel had returned with two more amphorae of holy oil; the smell alone made Castiel’s stomach turn.  “They should arrive about two hours after nightfall.”

            “Who knows what they’ll find?” Castiel sighed.  He pulled her to him and kissed her forehead.  “I apologize.  I must admit that this is one aspect of feelings that I do not relish.”

            “What, doubt?”  She snorted.  “No one does.”  She embraced him and rested her head on his chest for a moment.  “Let’s pretend we all survive for a moment.  You really think we have a shot?  All three of us?”

            Castiel hesitated.  He hadn’t thought much about the future.  “I don’t know where we’ll go or what we’ll do,” he confessed.  “But yes.  The two of you already love each other; you are siblings, and you’ve proven that you will risk everything for each other.  I see no reason why a third would be harmful.”

            She laughed and kissed him.  “I love the way you think.  We’ll figure it out once we get there.”

            As the sun started to set, the team met up on the top of the main gate and waited for Uriel’s return.  No one spoke much.  Even Gabriel seemed nervous.  Balthazar refused to leave Castiel’s side, Anael strained her entire being for some sign of trouble, Meg and Dean sniped at each other, and Sam chewed on his fingernails as his hazel eyes surveyed the horizon in search of his fate.

            Finally, exactly twenty-four hours after Uriel had said that he would return, Uriel appeared in precisely the same spot he’d been in before.  “Have you made the smart decision and decided to surrender that abomination unto me?”

            “Nah,” Dean shouted back.  “We think he’s still got some growing to do.  We think we’ll keep him for a little while longer.  We’re waiting for him to hit seven feet.”

            Uriel’s face twisted in fury.  “This, then, is the answer you expect me to take back to my superior?”

            Anael flew to a spot behind him.  A glint of silver flashed in the fading light, and Uriel gasped.  “No,” Anael growled into his ear.  “This is.”

            Uriel’s Grace exploded, leaving the charred remains of his wings on the parched ground.  Anael did not stay to admire her handiwork, but flew back into the safety of the walled city.

            It was well that she did.  A troop of angels appeared just where she’d been, uniforms identical and arrayed for battle.  At their head stood Zachariah and Raphael.


	8. You Can Make This World What You Want

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A clever trick indeed.

Castiel tried to stand firm in the face of the threatened onslaught, but only Sam’s bulk behind him kept his trembling hands from becoming visible to the masses.  “I should have suspected you would turn traitor eventually, Castiel,” Zachariah sneered, “but I never expected you would sink so low as to order the death of a brother at the hands of a renegade.”

            “Oh, Cas didn’t order Junkless’ death,” Dean smirked back.  “He didn’t have to.  New rule, asshat.  You even think about touching my baby brother, you die.  Got it?”

            Raphael’s lip curled.  “Do you honestly believe that _we_ need to even acknowledge that a mud monkey has opened its mouth?  You have a destiny, Dean Winchester, and it isn’t tied to that piece of filth that slipped out of your mother’s well-used loins.  You are our property, to do with as we see fit, and –“

            Dean snarled, and raised the Jewel of Lot.  Zachariah had the good sense to duck, and most of the other angels followed his lead.  Raphael, though, he had never been anything but arrogant, especially when it came to humans.  Castiel supposed that he couldn’t bring himself to believe that a human could have such an item in his possession, or that one could wield it.  Whatever the cause, the mighty archangel Raphael, physician of Heaven, froze in place with a shout as a bright green light shot forth from the jewel.  The comely, dark-skinned body he’d built for himself thousands of years ago crackled as it was transformed into a pillar of salt, right before the eyes of the gathered crowd.

            “Well,” smirked Gabriel.  “We’ll never want for venison again.”

            Zachariah’s face twisted into a rictus of hate as he stood up.  “You’ll pay for that, you hairless monkey!”

            An angel near the middle of the crowd produced a bow from somewhere – it could have been anywhere, really.  He drew back the string and let the arrow fly.  As the projectile arced through the air, a ball of flame attached itself to the sharp head.  It found its home not in Dean’s heart – he was too quick for that – but in his shoulder.

            The fight was on.

            Dean went down with a groan, and Castiel rushed to heal him.  The magical barrier kept the enemy out, but they’d anticipated such a tactic and had resorted to the weapons of those they believed to be beneath them.  Castiel should have expected that; he should have known that Zachariah was not above such tactics.

            “Thanks, Cas,” Dean grunted, rising to his feet.

            Sam stood on the walls, gold eyes a beacon even in the semi-darkness of twilight, and gestured at an angel.  The cambion’s face already glistened with sweat, but that didn’t stop him from twisting his hand into a complicated gesture.  The angel he’d targeted gasped and clutched at his chest and then fell to the dusty ground, Grace fluttering wildly before the charred imprints of his wings spread out onto the ground.

            Dean picked up his bow, and behind him the rest of Hunter Legion picked up bows as well.  Castiel frowned.  “What are those intended to do?  Weapons made of wood and iron cannot harm an angel.”

            Balthazar’s eyes lit up.  “They can if you soak them in holy oil,” he declared.  “Watch this.”

            The Hunters unleashed a barrage of arrows upon the angels, and every single arrow found a target of angel-animated flesh.  The angels glanced at each other, unaware of any problem.  That was when Meg snickered and threw her hands out wide over the gathered enemy.  Flames appeared as if from nowhere, igniting the oil-soaked shafts and making the enemy scream aloud in agony.  Some of the angels fled their vessels, escaping through the mouth in bright blue shafts of light to return to Heaven and rebuild.  Others died where they stood, screaming so loudly that the few trees in the area burst into flame and the humans had to cover their ears.

            In the distance, Castiel saw two ominous black clouds, approaching from opposite directions.  Demons.  Hopefully one of them meant Abaddon’s reinforcements.  Unfortunately, one of them was almost certainly Lucifer’s band.

            Zachariah cried out an obscenity and launched himself at the gates to the city, which repulsed him with a flash of green light.  The seraph was launched backwards onto his rear end, an undignified position for anyone never mind an angel obsessed with his position and status.  When he rose, he flew away.  He returned a moment later with a massive machine.  “Catapult,” he sneered.  “No magic, no tricks, just a nice little toy that will tear those walls down.”  He pointed at the siege engine, and the thing loaded and aimed itself.  “Of course, I do have certain advantages.”

            Sam killed another angel with nothing but the power of his mind.  The effort left him panting and gray in the face.  “We can’t take a lot of hits from one of those,” he said in a low voice to Castiel and Dean.  “I’m going to take it out.”

            Meg punched him in the arm.  “You can’t go out there, Sam!  The whole point is that they want you out there and on the other side of the wards!”

            “Meg is right,” Castiel told his lover.  “We cannot risk you.”

            “We can’t risk losing Haven’s physical walls either!”  Sam slapped the crenellation in front of him.  “They’re not built for that, and as soon as the angels leave, even if they leave Haven standing after all of this, demons will come and take advantage!  Lilith’s band is still out there, Crowley’s people are out there –“

            Castiel stopped his mouth with a kiss.  “Sam.  We aren’t risking you.  Nothing is worth losing you.”

            Gabriel’s eyes bulged.  “I did not see that coming.  Okay.  Well.  One dead catapult, coming up.”  He squinted at the catapult, snapped his fingers, and the machine shattered into a thousand pieces.

            Sam glared at him for a moment.  “You couldn’t have said something before my sister punched me?”

            “Aw, Sammy got a boo-boo?” the archangel mocked.  “Save it, pal.”

            Zachariah’s eyes narrowed as he stared at Gabriel.  The archangel waved.  “You look familiar.”  He snorted at Castiel.  “You can try to thwart us with this motley crew of renegade demons, half-breeds and pagan scum.  But you won’t win, Castiel.  This fight is our Father’s wish.  You can’t stop it.  And that… vile creature you’re so fond of, he isn’t yours to play with.  He belongs to Lucifer, created for him in fact, and believe me when I tell you that he is very well used.”

            Sam tilted his head to the side.  “Can I kill him?”

            “I kind of want first dibs, Sammy.”  Dean prepared an arrow.

            “He’s a traitor to Heaven and to God.”  Castiel drew his blade.  “I think I’d like to handle him.

            “He’s a smarmy dick.  Why don’t we all have a little fun?”  Meg smiled a sweet smile and whistled.

            A low baying sound filled the air.  Dean flinched.

            Gabriel rolled his eyes.  “So much posturing.”  He extended a hand, and Zachariah started to burn.  The stench was terrible, worse than human flesh, and Castiel knew that was because Gabriel was making Zachariah’s Grace burn along with his vessel.  It was the worst kind of death, the kind of thing that angels only heard about in hushed warnings when one’s behavior was in danger of crossing a line that could not be uncrossed.  He’d never seen it happen before.

            He hoped to never see it happen again.

            “I wasn’t just our Father’s messenger,” Gabriel said when it was finished.  “I was the Archangel of Judgment, too, if you’ll recall.”  His eyes flared, amber lights in the darkness for just a moment.  “He was a traitor.  It was the kind of death that he deserved.  He could never have been redeemed, you know.”

            The remaining angels had stopped in their paths, milling about in confusion now.  “What have you done?” one cried.  “Who are you?”

            Gabriel sighed.  “I think the better question is who are you?  You already know that I’m an archangel; I’m not Michael, I’m not Raphael and I’m sure as Hell not Lucifer.”  He chuckled at his own pun and produced a piece of rock candy on a stick to suck on.

            “My name is Hannah, sir.  Why did you kill Zachariah in that way?  He was following our Father’s orders!”

            “No.  He wasn’t.  Our Father hasn’t been in Heaven since, oh, about the time Lucifer got the boot.  He hasn’t called the shots in a very, very long time.  Zachariah lied to you all.  I don’t know how far up it goes, if he duped Raffy or if Michael’s involved.  But you know, deep down in your hearts, that the orders you’ve been given have been the opposite of what our Father wanted from us.  Don’t you?”

            Another angel stepped forward.  “But they were orders!”

            “Shut up, Hester,” Hannah ordered.  “Our brother is right.  We should have recognized that the orders were against our Father’s will.  We are angels, not brainless automatons.”  She dismissed her blade, leaving herself empty handed.  “We have been misled.  I will not fight against Haven, nor will I participate in this fruitless attempt to displease our Father by warring with Lucifer.”

            “Nor will I.”  Castiel recognized the speaker as Samandriel.  “I ought to have spoken up when the kill order against Castiel came down.  I didn’t understand it, and I should have questioned further.  I was afraid.”

            Slowly but surely, the remaining angels lay down their arms.  Castiel gaped in amazement.  When he turned to look at his fellow angels, he saw similar expressions on their faces.  “I can’t believe that worked,” Gabriel muttered.  “I was kind of going for a distraction while you guys shot more of them.”

            “Good to know.”  Sam glowered at him, but didn’t raise his voice.

            “I am glad that you are no longer hostile,” Castiel smiled at the defectors.  “I must ask you now: what is your intent?  Will you return to Heaven, and take up the cause against corruption there?  Or will you defend the humans of Earth?”

            “If I may,” Balthazar interrupted, clearing his throat, “We do have the slight problem of Lucifer and his people, who are arriving as we speak.”

            Castiel had almost forgotten about them, but the first of the demonic clouds was upon them.  The stars seemed to fade out as the cloud overtook the sky, but they returned as the cloud sank to the ground and solidified into bodies.  Hundreds of bodies, all with blackened eyes and snarling faces.

            And at their head: Lucifer.  His vessel had been built as a tall, sturdily built man, with short blond hair and a cruel twist to his mouth.  “I see I’m just slightly late to the party,” he said.  His tone was even, almost soft, and Castiel could almost mistake the coldness underneath it for calmness and indifference.  “I hope we haven’t missed all of the festivities; otherwise we’ll have to make our own.”  Icy blue eyes surveyed the scene.  “Raphael seems to have been misplaced.”

            The angels outside the barrier did not bother to hide the sheer terror on their faces.  Castiel didn’t blame them.  He wouldn’t have.  “Leave, Lucifer,” he ordered, from his position of safety behind the barrier.  “Go forth from this place and trouble the people no more.  There is nothing for you here.”

            The archangel scoffed.  “You think to give me orders?  I appreciate your audacity, Castiel, but really, don’t you think that’s a tad premature?”  He gestured, and Hester’s vessel exploded.  “The angelic side of this equation might have been cancelled out, but Haven has something that belongs to me and I won’t leave unless I have it back.”

            Meg was hiding underneath the crenellations, shaking uncontrollably.  Castiel squeezed her shoulder.  “Nothing belongs to you, Lucifer,” Castiel told him.  “And no one belongs to you.”

            “Samael,” Lucifer continued, as though Castiel hadn’t spoken.  “Come out here, right now, and return to your place at my side.  There will be consequences if you resist.”  He crossed his arms over his chest, his face that of an indulgent parent being presented with a recalcitrant toddler trying to avoid bedtime.

            “Oh what, you mean like there won’t be if he does?”  Dean prepared another arrow.

            “That won’t work on him,” Gabriel hissed, face pale.

            “Why not?” the hunter hissed back.

            “Archangel,” Sam told his brother, eyes on the one claiming ownership over him.  “There isn’t much that can take on an archangel.  A knight of Hell and another archangel’s blade, that’s about it.”

            Gabriel bit his lip.  “I’ve got an idea,” he murmured.  “It’s risky.”

            “It’s all risky,” Balthazar pointed out.  “It’s Lucifer.”

            “Alright, valid.  But it means that Sammy here’s going to have to trust me.  And I mean, really trust me.”

            Castiel felt Sam tense beside him.  “Is it the only way to stop Lucifer?” his lover asked.

            “Unless you’ve got a knight of Hell in your back pocket, yes.”  Gabriel smirked.  “And I notice that skirt you’re wearing doesn’t have pockets.”

            “We do have one on the way,” Meg told them, glaring at Gabriel.

            “Great.  They can help if they get here before he figures out what we’re doing.  Okay, Sam, this is going to hurt.  Meg, cover us.”

            Gabriel cradled Sam’s face with his hands.  A golden halo surrounded both for a moment, and then Gabriel slumped back against the wall.  “Alright.”  Sam stood up, face no longer gray and no longer trembling from exertion.  “I know what we need to do.  Whatever happens, don’t let the gate back down until you see Lucifer dead with your own eyes.  Got it?”  He fixed all three conscious angels with his eyes.

            “Wait, what?” Dean asked, even as Castiel reached out for his lover.

            “Sam, no.”

            But it was too late.  Sam climbed to the top of the parapet, stood for a moment, and then jumped.  He didn’t plummet to the ground, however, but floated gently to the parched and hard earth beneath.  His eyes, Castiel noticed, had gone yellow.

            “There’s a good little abomination,” Lucifer said, watching with that same cold little smile as Sam walked across the small expanse of space to the ultimate fallen angel.  “It was very naughty of you to run away, Samael.  You’ll need to be punished, but I’m sure you knew that already.”

            Sam bowed his head.  “Of course, Master.”  He sank to his knees.  “Whatever you see fit, Master.”

            Lucifer stared down at Sam for a moment, and then he clenched his fist.  Sam cried out as pain shot through his tall, muscular body.  The demons with Lucifer laughed, but their leader silenced them with a gesture as Sam’s body jerked around the ground and blood streamed from his nose.  After a good five minutes had passed, in which no one on the Haven walls dared to move, Lucifer released Sam.  “That will do for now, until we return to camp.  I am very displeased with you, Samael.”

            “I know you are, Master.”  Sam lay in his place for a moment, collecting his breath.  Then, he struggled to his feet.  No one moved to help him.   Even the angels stayed frozen in place.

            The other cloud had almost arrived.  Castiel still couldn’t tell which demonic tribe it was – Abaddon, Lilith, Crowley or other, he had no way of knowing.

            “I have a message for you, Master.  From the city – from the inside.”  Sam still wasn’t breathing well, and blood welled up at the corner of his mouth before he wiped it away.  “From your brothers.”

            Lucifer’s lip curled.  “Which brothers would those be?  It seems to me your little friends turned one of them into a pillar of salt and the other one is too busy looking at mirrors up in Heaven to be bothered.”

            So – Michael hadn’t been involved with this conspiracy.  He’d allowed it to happen, though.  Castiel shuddered away from the implications.  He shuddered away from the broken way in which Sam’s body was moving, too, even though he forced himself to watch.

            “It’s going to be okay, big brother.”  Sam’s mouth curled into a smile, but his eyes flashed amber just for a moment and an archangel’s blade appeared in his hand.  It almost looked too small for his huge hand with its long, elegant fingers, but he made it work.  “It’s all going to be okay.”  He stabbed up and into Lucifer’s chest.

            To say that Lucifer was surprised by this act of violent rebellion would be an understatement.  His eyes bulged, and his mouth moved without sound.  Then, his grace exploded in his vessel, creating a blast wave that knocked all in its path backward.  The imprint of all of his wings would never leave the earth.

            Gabriel’s vessel woke up with a start.  “Wow.  That was not fun.”

            Dean rounded on him.  “What the hell was that?”

            “I just stabbed my older brother?”  Gabriel blinked and brushed at some dirt that only he could see.  “Castiel, you’d better take good care of that kid.  He’s not well.”

            “You possessed him?” Meg cried.

            “You so don’t get to complain about that,” Dean growled.

            “You left him out there?” Castiel challenged Gabriel.

            “He didn’t give me much choice!”  Gabriel leaped to his feet and rushed over to the wall.  “He kicked me out as soon as that blade went in.  Didn’t want me in there a second longer than necessary.”  His face softened.  “Not that I can blame him, I guess.”

            Out on the field, the demons had processed what had happened to their lord and circled around Sam.  The angels attacked, and they were effective as they worked, but there were only about forty angels to the thousands of demons encircling the young cambion.

            Sam, of course, was not without resources of his own.  One demon near him collapsed in a shower of orange light, then another, and another.  Sam was fighting.  Meg’s hellhounds, too, jumped into the fray.

            The other cloud arrived, demons solidifying on the opposite side of the field from the angels.  At their head stood a tall, red-haired female demon, clad in black leather and carrying an axe.  The demons with her snarled, barely resembling anything human at this point, and charged without a word from their poised commander.

            Castiel turned to the others.  “I’m getting Sam out.”  He flew into the middle of the fight, where he could still see the flashes of light that heralded the death of a demon.

            Sam was still alive, but how long that would remain the case remained to be seen.  He seemed to be upright through force of will more than anything else, and staggered with each blow that came in.  Castiel felt a stone blade shatter on his armor and a claw rip through his forearm, but these were of no moment to an angel; he picked up his lover and flew back to the safety of the city walls, where he lay the young man down where Gabriel had only recently been propped.

            “Sammy?”  Dean knelt by his brother’s side, fight outside the walls forgotten.  “Sammy, talk to me.  Come on, man.  You can’t go, not like this.”  He grabbed Sam’s hand.

            Sam’s eyes were already glazing over.  “Dean.”  He squeezed the hand in his.  “I’m glad.”

            “Gabriel.”  Castiel turned to the archangel.  “Please.”

            The prodigal sighed.  “He’s pretty bad off, Cassie.  Is there someplace we can bring him?”

            Balthazar nodded.  “He shouldn’t have a problem with the wards and if he does, well, he can tell you how to fix it.”

            Castiel gathered Sam to his chest, not caring about the blood.  Gabriel put a hand on his shoulder, and Castiel flew them to Balthazar’s cave.

            Gabriel didn’t bother with a lot of niceties once they were there.  He simply lay Sam out on the floor and put his hands on his chest.  “That’s a lot of blood, kiddo.”  He closed his eyes and concentrated while Castiel backed away.

            He’d wanted to be the one to heal Sam, if it had been necessary, but he knew that the man was beyond what his own powers allowed.  Still, the fact that someone else got to heal Sam rankled.  Perhaps Sam would prefer a partner of greater power than Castiel.  Perhaps he would love someone whose affections were not divided, someone to whom he owed his life.  Someone who had helped him to eliminated his most hated tormentor.

            He should be out there on the walls anyway, or out among his brethren fighting hand-to-hand against the tribe that Lucifer had led.  If Sam chose Gabriel over him, he wouldn’t fight.  Sam deserved the best, after all.

            He moved to leave the pair alone, but Gabriel stood up and snapped his fingers.  The blood disappeared from his own clothes and from Castiel’s.  Sam’s destroyed garments he simply replaced with a soft purple tunic.  “Cassie, I can see the thoughts tumbling around in your head.  Stop.  You’re the one that saved his life, okay?”

            Castiel stared at Gabriel for a moment, uncertain.  Then he looked away, preferring to devote his attention to his lover.  “Why isn’t he waking up?”

            “He lost a lot of blood.  I was able to heal his wounds,” the archangel explained, leaning back on one of Balthazar’s piles of cushions.  “It wasn’t easy, but I managed.  I couldn’t replenish his blood supply; that’s something that only time can do.  I could just manage to keep his organs functioning.  And then there’s the whole getting possessed by an archangel thing – I honestly don’t know how he was still functioning after I pulled out of him, never mind able to fight demons.”  He shook his head.  “He’s a strong kid.”  He tilted his head.  “So.  You and him, and you and Meg, huh?”

            “I love them.  I love them both, and they love each other.”  He squinted at Gabriel, daring him to disapprove.

            Gabriel did not.  “Hey, man.  I’m in no position to judge.  Think Big Brother’s going to be so keen on the idea, though?”

            Castiel sat beside Sam and put Sam’s head into his lap.  “I couldn’t say.  He has to know that I would never want to hurt Sam, though.”

            “Big brothers aren’t always the most rational when it comes to things like that.  I’m going to head back out to the front.  We should be okay.  Without Lucifer, the demons should be pretty easy pickings, between the angels and Abaddon’s tribe.  Still, someone should be out there directing traffic.  You stay here and keep an eye on Sam.”  He flew away.

            Castiel moved Sam back to the bedroom Balthazar had assigned them the day before, tucking his unconscious partner beneath the covers before hesitating, shucking his armor and joining him there.  Gabriel had given permission for this, right?  He could lie here with Sam, hold him and be with him.  

            He had never thought of himself as the type of angel that offered comfort, if indeed such a thing existed.  He was a warrior of Heaven, brought into being to serve God with sword and Grace.  Sam, however, seemed to derive something from his presence that the angel hadn’t been designed to give.  His breathing became more even, more comfortable.  His brow smoothed out, and when Castiel reached an arm around him his entire body relaxed into the touch.

            After two hours, Meg joined them.  “The fight is over,” she informed, crawling under his other arm and laying her head on his chest.  “We won.”

            He kissed the top of her head.  “This must have been a very difficult day for you.”

            “I still loved him,” she admitted.  “Even after.  I mean, I wasn’t going to go back, not after everything I saw, not after what he did to Samael.  Sam.  But I still – I guess I hoped that something could be done for him, that he could get better.”

            He stroked her cheek with gentle fingers.  “I think, on some level, we did too.  I mean, if what Gabriel said is true then even my Father regretted his exile.  But in the end, Lucifer was going to destroy humanity.”

            “I know.”  She buried her face in his chest and fell silent for a while.

            Sam woke about an hour later, still groggy from blood loss but alive.  His first act was to pull Castiel in for a kiss.  “Thank you for coming for me,” he whispered.  “I know I didn’t deserve it.”

            Meg flicked the tip of his ear with her fingernail.  “Don’t even start that,” she ordered, climbing over Castiel to kiss her brother on the forehead.  “I’m proud of you, Sam.  You saved the world.”

            A prayer from Dean flashed across Castiel’s consciousness, peppered with impatience and obscene language.  “Sam, your brother wishes to speak with you.  With us, apparently.  Are you prepared for that?”

            Sam raised himself into a sitting position.  “I’d like to see him,” he said with a shy little blush.

            Castiel admitted the eager hunter, who strode in with a pale face until he saw his brother’s eyes open and alert.  “If you ever scare me like that again, Sammy –“

            “You’ll kill me?” Sam smirked.

            Dean glowered, then he returned a smirk of his own.  “I’ll make you survive on Bobby’s cooking for a week.”

            “Dean, that’s cruel and unusual punishment!”  Sam squirmed and tried to hide under the covers.  “So not fair!”

            Dean beamed.  “Then we have an understanding.”  His face grew serious.  “Sam.  Now that the battle is over, we need to talk about what happens next.”

            Sam bit his lip, and Castiel squeezed his hand.  “I can go, Dean, I don’t want to interfere with what you’ve got going on here.”

            Dean reached out and flicked the tip of Sam’s other ear with his fingernail.  “That’s about enough of that.  I just got you back, Sammy.  All these years I’ve been without you, and I’ve finally got you back.  You think I want you to go again because of a few bigots?  They saw what you did.  They saw you fight.  They saw you all fight.  Meg too.  They saw everything we all did.  If they want to say something about you now, I think the rest of the city is going to run them out on a rail.”

            “They’re seriously going to let a demon, and a half-demon, stay in the city.”  Meg looked up at him through her lashes.  “Give me a break, Dean.”

            “It’s for real.  There’s even a place for you.  Well, us.”  He shifted.  “I thought we could maybe fix up that old bath house.  I talked to Gabriel about it.  He thought it would be a good place for a ‘den of debauchery,’ which sounds awesome when he’s not talking about my little brother.”

            “Wait – you want to stay with us?”  Sam blinked.

            Castiel shared his doubt.  “Hunter Legion has always been nomadic.  Your father was quite insistent.”

            “Yeah, well, Dad made some mistakes.”  A glimmer of pride surged through Castiel when only a tiny muscle twitched in Dean’s jaw at that.  “One of them cost me over a decade with my little brother.  And I am incredibly proud of my little brother. So what do you say?”

            Sam looked to Castiel and to Meg.  “Are you guys okay with this?” he asked.  “I don’t want to make decisions that affect you without, you know, asking you first.”

            “You’re the one that sleeps at night,” Meg teased.  “Although I’m okay with sharing some space with Dean-o if he’s okay with sharing with creepy old things like me.”  She smiled sweetly at him.

            Dean returned the smile.  “I think we can come to an accommodation.”

            Thanks to the assistance of Gabriel and Balthazar, renovations to the old bathhouse didn’t take long at all and before long the family was able to move into their opulent new home.  The domestic arrangement raised some eyebrows among the humans, who doubtless imagined far more was going on than there was, but it worked for the family.

 

 


End file.
